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A comparison in the performance between hard- and soft-decision Viterbi decoding, with application to the HIPERLAN/2 standard, is presented. The results show that when channel state information (CSI) is included in the generation of the soft-decision information, the soft-decision method greatly outperforms the hard method. Moreover, a simplified algorithm for the soft-output demapper for the 16-QAM and 64-QAM constellations is developed, which allows the complexity of the demapper to be maintained at almost the same level for all the possible modes of HIPERLAN/2.
Tosato et al. (2003) studied this question.