Using a Single-Parity-Check to Reduce the Guesswork of Guessing Codeword Decoding

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to reduce the number of queries in Guessing Codeword Decoding by adding a single parity-check bit, improving efficiency especially at lower SNRs without sacrificing decoding accuracy.

Contribution

It demonstrates that incorporating a full-message single parity-check (SPC) bit can halve the query complexity of GCD, with minimal impact on decoding precision, and proposes a practical implementation approach.

Findings

Query reduction up to 50% at lower SNRs

Adding SPC bit maintains decoding accuracy

Method applicable to codes without initial SPC by matrix modification

Abstract

Guessing Codeword Decoding (GCD) is a recently proposed soft-input forward error correction decoder for arbitrary binary linear codes. Inspired by recent proposals that leverage binary linear codebook structure to reduce the number of queries made by Guessing Random Additive Noise Decoding (GRAND), for binary linear codes that include a full-message single parity-check (SPC) bit, we show that it is possible to reduce the number of queries made by GCD by a factor of up to 2 with the greatest guesswork reduction realized at lower SNRs, without impacting decoding precision. Codes without a full-message SPC can be modified to include one by changing a column of the generator matrix to obtain a decoding complexity advantage, and we demonstrate that this can often be done without losing decoding precision. To practically avail of the complexity advantage, a noise effect pattern generator capable of producing sequences for given Hamming weights, such as the landslide algorithm developed for ORBGRAND, is necessary.