OLANIYAN, O.. (1989). Implementable soft decision decoding schemes. International Journal of Electronics - INT J ELECTRON. 66. 321-332. 10.1080/00207218908925389. An implementable soft decision decoding algorithm is described. The scheme, which can be used to improve the performance of any hard decision decoder, is based on an iterative search method that tests relatively few possible code words from which the code word at nearest minimum distance from the received word is chosen. Computer simulations of the (7, 4) and (15, 7) codes on an additive white gaussian noise channel using the soft decision scheme were undertaken. A coding gain of at least 0-7 dB at an error rate of 10~3 was obtained when compared with that of the hard decision decoder.