Soft decoding without soft demapping with ORBGRAND

Abstract: For spectral efficiency, higher order modulation symbols confer information on more than one bit. As soft detection forward error correction decoders assume the availability of information at binary granularity, however, soft demappers are required to compute per-bit reliabilities from complex-valued signals. Here we show that the recently introduced universal soft detection decoder ORBGRAND can be adapted to work with symbol-level soft information, obviating the need for energy expensive soft demapping. We establish that doing so reduces complexity while retaining the error correction performance achieved with the optimal demapper.