An expurgation upper bound on the probability of correct path loss for list decoding of time-invariant convolutional codes

In this paper list decoding of convolutional codes is considered. List decoding is a very powerful, low complexity, non-backtracking decoding method that does not fully exploit the error correcting capability of the code. A correct path loss is a serious kind of error event that is typical for list decoding. An expurgated upper bound on the probability of correct path loss is derived for the ensembles of systematic and nonsystematic time-varying convolutional codes.