Soft Decision Decoding vs. Hard Decision Decoding with Viterbi Algorithm

This study compares the performance of soft decision decoding (SDD) and hard decision decoding (HDD) when symbols propagate through an AWGN channel. The frame error rate (FER) decreases logarithmically as error frames reduce, demonstrating SDD's superiority over HDD which yields higher penalties. The implementation employs Viterbi decoding algorithm with branch metric calculations adapted for both hard and soft quantization schemes.