Iterative Soft Decision Decoding of Reed Solomon Codes Based On . . .

This paper presents a soft decision decoding algorithm for Reed Solomon (RS) codes using their binary image representations. The novelty of the proposed decoding algorithm is in reducing the submatrix corresponding to the less reliable bits to a sparse nature prior to each decoding iteration. Simulation results show that the new method provides significant gain over hard decision decoding (HDD) and compares favorably with other popular soft decision decoding methods [1]