On the Theory of List Decoding of Convolutional Codes

Lower bounds on the list minimum weight and list weight are obtained for ensembles of systematic and nonsystematic encoders. From these bounds it follows that the necessary list size grows exponentially with the number of corrected errors. We obtain an expurgated upper bound on the probability of the correct path loss for the ensemble of time-invariant binary convolutional codes. The notion of an $\ell$-list weight enumerator is introduced and used to obtain an upper bound on the probability of the correct path loss for list decoding of a fixed convolutional code.