Soft-Decision Decoding of Reed-Solomon Codes Using Successive Error-and-Ersure Decoding

The authors propose a soft-decision decoding algorithm of Reed-Solomon (RS) codes using successive error-and-erasure decoding. Extensive simulations are conducted to show the possible performance gain of the proposed method. They derive a formula for performance estimation based on ordered statistics of symbol reliability, which matches well with the results of the simulation. The proposed method with almost the same average complexity as a conventional hard-decision decoder outperforms Koetter-Vardy (KV) algorithm and Chase2-GMD Algorithm (CGA). Reed-Solomon (RS) codes are one of the most popular codes in current applications for digital communications and data storage systems.