On parallel iterative decoding of product code

This paper investigates parallel decoding of product code on the level of constituent decoders. Product code, based on a simple and short linear block code, allows the construction of fairly long codes with low complexity as well as a simple iterative decoding algorithm. We find that parallel decoding offers slight BER improvement over traditional serial decoding for three dimensional codes. More significantly, the results imply that parallelism could reduce the average decoding iterations.