A Class of Staircase Codes With Mixed Components and Its Low-Complexity Decoding

In this paper, we study a class of staircase codes (SCCs), which is constructed by algebraic and single-parity-check component codes. These codes are referred to as mixed-component SCCs (MC-SCCs). We propose a low-complexity ternary message passing decoding algorithm for MC-SCCs, where error-and-erasure decoding plays a core role and soft reliability is reconstructed by hard decisions and channel log-likelihood ratios. We develop the density evolution analysis that is applicable to both binary and non-binary algebraic codes to optimize the decoder. By properly selecting mixed components, we can construct low-error-floor MC-SCCs with a smaller size of decoding window (proportional to component lengths) and a faster speed of convergence compared with the conventional SCCs. Moreover, we verify that for various requirements of overhead and decoding window size, MC-SCCs can outperform the conventional SCCs with both BCH components in terms of both error-rate performance and decoding complexity.