There are several methods for decoding of convolutional codes but one which has found prominence and is extensively used all over the world even in mobile communication case, is the probabilistic decoding given to us by Viterbi as the bits are received from the channel they are compared with possible transmitted code according to some specified matrix and a part which is more probabilistic is selected. After a certain number of steps, the first information bit which was transmitted gets to the user and after each bit block comes the next information bit goes to the user and in that sense the Viterbi decoding algorithm is an online decoding algorithm.

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