Soft-in soft-out decoding of Reed-Solomon codes based on Vardy and Be'ery's decomposition

This correspondence presents an optimal soft-in soft-out (SISO) decoding algorithm for the binary image of Reed-Solomon (RS) codes that is based on Vardy and Be'ery's optimal soft-in hard-out algorithm. A novel suboptimal list-based SISO decoder that exploits Vardy and Be'ery's decomposition is also presented. For those codes with very high rate, which allows practical decoding with the proposed algorithms, the proposed suboptimal SISO significantly outperforms standard list-based decoding techniques in iteratively decoded systems.