Generalized trace back techniques for survivor memory management in the Viterbi algorithm

A general framework for designing survivor memory based on the trace-back technique with any number of trace-back pointers is presented. It is shown that the memory size is reduced by using more trace-back pointers and that a uniform speed realization can be achieved with more than one trace back pointer. Two implementations of the K-pointer trace-back techniques based on standard RAMs and custom-shift registers are presented.