Techniques are provided herein to improve the decoding efficiency in a wireless receiver to obtain a correctly decoded data string. A state metric matrix from a received codeword is used to generate active state metric matrices for time instances of the received codeword, and then a differential metric matrix is generated from information in the active state metric matrices. Based on the differential metric matrix a maximum likelihood path and one or more alternative paths are identified. A first decoded data string corresponding to the maximum likelihood path and a plurality of second decoded data strings corresponding to the one or more alternative paths are derived. Integrity of the respective decoded data strings is examined to obtain the correct decoded data string based on the first and second decoded data strings.