This paper presents a unified method for evaluating the error-correction radii of many reliability-based soft-decision decoding algorithms for binary linear block codes. Based on this unified method, these decoding algorithms as well as their potential improvements can be compared directly. The error-correction radius for each of these decoding algorithms is determined by finding the closest point on the boundary of the decision region of the soft-decision decoder to the transmitted signal sequence. It is shown that this problem can be formulated as a constrained optimization problem. Although no general closed-form expression is possible, a simple algorithm that always converges to the optimum solution of this optimization problem is presented. Based on these results, the error-correction radii of some well-known reliability-based soft-decision decoding algorithms are revisited and compared.
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