Symbol-Wise Chase Decoding of q-ary Block Codes over BI-AWGN Channels

This letter investigates Chase decoding of q-ary block codes over binary input additive white Gaussian noise channels. Performances of bitwise and symbol-wise test pattern generation are compared. A simple algorithm for evaluating symbol reliability is proposed. Simulation results for Reed-Solomon codes show that the proposed symbol-wise algorithm has a better performance than a bitwise approach with no increase in overall decoding complexity.