Soft-decision redundant residue number system based error correction coding

Soft-decision-based redundant residue number system (RRNS)-assisted error control coding is proposed and its performance is evaluated. An RRNS(n,k) code is a maximum-minimum distance block code, exhibiting identical distance properties to Reed-Solomon (RS) codes. Hence their error correction capability is given by t=(n-k)/2. Different bit mapping methods are proposed, which result in systematic and non-systematic RRNS encoders. We show that the classic Chase algorithm can be invoked, in order to contrive soft-decision detection for RRNS codes and to exploit the soft channel outputs, which provide the relative reliability of each of the received binary digits. We found that soft decision-based RRNS decoding is at least 1.5 dB better compared to hard decision-assisted RRNS decoding.