Performance of Flexible and Low complexity Decoding RS-SPC Product Codes for Short-Packet Communications

In this paper, we propose a product code scheme based on a Reed-Solomon (RS) code concatenated with the single parity check code (SPC). We introduce a novel soft-in-soft-out (SISO) algorithm with very low decoding complexity for the SPC code. We show that this new coding scheme has similar performance to the RS turbo product code (TPCs) for BER values as low as $10^{-5}$ but with significant gain in both decoding complexity and packet size flexibility.