Low-Complexity High-Rate Reed--Solomon Block Turbo Codes

This letter considers high-rate block turbo codes (BTC) obtained by concatenation of two single-error-correcting Reed-Solomon (RS) constituent codes. Simulation results show that these codes perform within 1 dB of the theoretical limit for binary transmission over additive white Gaussian noise with a low-complexity decoder. A comparison with Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem BTCs of similar code rate reveals that RS BTCs have interesting advantages in terms of memory size and decoder complexity for very-high-data-rate decoding architectures.