Figure 2

Decoding process of the B-CVA ML decoder. For the first iteration, four survivor paths corresponding to each of the terminal states are shown on the tail-biting trellis in (a), where the tail-biting trellis has been split at location l=0. For the second iteration, the decoding process is illustrated from (b) to (e). Searches following the circles with left incident branch are terminated according to step 2.1. The decoding process is terminated at l=4 since there are no survivor paths with net path metric less than${\tilde{M}}^{\mathrm{O}}$.