Soft-Decision Redundant Residue Number System Based Error Correction Coding

Soft-decision based redundant residue number system (RRNS) assisted error control coding is proposed and its performance is evaluated. An RRNS (n, k) code is a maximum-minimum distance block code, exhibiting identical distance properties to Reed-Solomon (RS) codes. Hence their error correction capability is given by t = (n - k)/2. Different bit mapping methods are proposed, which result in systematic and non-systematic RRNS encoders. We show that the classic Chase algorithm can be invoked, in order to contrive soft-decision detection for RRNS codes and to exploit the soft channel outputs, which provide the relative reliability of each of the received binary digits. We found that soft decision based RRNS decoding is at least 1.5dB better as compared to hard decision assisted RRNS decoding