Soft-decision decoding of BCH code in the global navigation satellite system( GNSS) is investigated in order to improve the performance of traditional hard-decision decoding. Using the nice structural properties of BCH code,a soft-decision decoding scheme is proposed. It is theoretically shown that the proposed scheme exactly performs maximum-likelihood( ML) decoding,which means the decoding performance is optimal. Moreover,an efficient implementation method of the proposed scheme is designed based on Viterbi algorithm. Simulation results show that the performance of the proposed soft-decision ML decoding scheme is significantly improved compared with the traditional hard-decision decoding method at the expense of moderate complexity increase. Soft-decision decoding of BCH code in the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) is investigated in order to improve the performance of traditional hard-decision decoding. Using the nice structural properties of BCH code, a soft-decision decoding scheme is proposed. It Moreover, an efficient implementation method of the proposed scheme is designed based on Viterbi algorithm. Simulation results show that the performance of the proposed soft-decision ML decoding scheme is significantly improved compared with the traditional hard-decision decoding method at the expense of moderate complexity increase.