Error Correction Coding With LDPC Codes for Patterned Media Storage

Recently, the ldquomultiple islands per read headrdquo model has been proposed for patterned media storage systems. In this paper, we investigated the applications of nonbinary low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes to such channels. Different nonbinary LDPC codes are designed for different read head models. We have also investigated the iterative decoding/detection algorithms for such coded systems. Simulation results show that significant performance improvements in terms of the symbol error rate (SER) can be achieved, especially when iterative decoding/detection algorithms are implemented, whereby soft extrinsic messages are exchanged between the belief-propagation-based decoder for the nonbinary LDPC code and the Bahl-Cocke-Jelinek-Raviv (BCJR)-based detector for the patterned media storage channel.