Generalized concatenated codes with soft decoding of inner and outer codes

In this paper we propose a generalized concatenated code (GC code) construction based on shortened Reed-Solomon inner codes and nonbinary LDPC outer codes. We also propose a soft-input decoder for this construction that makes use of soft-input soft-output decoding of both inner and outer codes. We show that this construction gives significant coding gain. We also compared it to generalized error-location codes with Reed-Solomon component codes and hard-decision decoding. We believe that the proposed code could be used in modern and future radio communication systems.