V2X (Vehicle-to-everything) communication relies on short messages for short-range transmissions over a fading wireless channel, yet requires high reliability and low latency. Hard-decision decoding sacrifices the preservation of diversity order, leading to pronounced performance degradation in fading channels. By contrast, soft-decision decoding retains diversity order, albeit at the cost of increased computational complexity. We introduce a novel enhanced hard-decision decoder termed as the Diversity Flip decoder (DFD) designed for preserving the diversity order. Moreover, it exhibits 'universal' applicability to all linear block codes. For a $\mathscr{C}(n,k)$ code having a minimum distance ${d_{\min}}$, the proposed decoder incurs a worst-case complexity order of $2^{({d_{\min}}-1)}-1$. Notably, for codes having low ${d_{\min}}$, this complexity represents a significant reduction compared to the popular soft and hard decision decoding algorithms. Due to its capability of maintaining diversity at a low complexity, it is eminently suitable for applications such as V2X (Vehicle-to-everything), IoT (Internet of Things), mMTC (Massive Machine type Communications), URLLC (Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communications) and WBAN (Wireless Body Area Networks) for efficient decoding with favorable performance characteristics. The simulation results provided for various known codes and decoding algorithms validate the performance versus complexity benefits of the proposed decoder.

Journal of 23 pages