Computing Maximum-Likelihood Bounds for Reed-Solomon Codes over Partial Response Channels

Computing maximum-likelihood bounds on the performance of systems involving partial response (PR) channels, with or without an error correcting code present, is rather complex, requiring exponentiating large matrices of polynomials. Being able to practically and efficiently compute these bounds, especially for cases with data sequences and channels more complex than previously considered cases, is expensive in both computational time and memory used. In this paper, we discuss our implementation of a program to compute these bounds for the case of Reed-Solomon codes over PR channels and explore some of the choices and tradeoffs made in that implementation.