Duality of Channel Encoding and Decoding - Part I: Rate-1 Binary Convolutional Codes

Abstract: In this paper, we revisit the forward, backward and bidirectional Bahl-Cocke-Jelinek-Raviv (BCJR) soft-input soft-output (SISO) maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) decoding process of rate-1 binary convolutional codes. From this we establish some interesting explicit relationships between encoding and decoding of rate-1 convolutional codes. We observe that the forward and backward BCJR SISO MAP decoders can be simply represented by their dual SISO channel encoders using shift registers in the complex number field. Similarly, the bidirectional MAP decoding can be implemented by linearly combining the shift register contents of the dual SISO encoders of the respective forward and backward decoders. The dual encoder structures for various recursive and non-recursive rate-1 convolutional codes are derived.