Turbo decoding of Reed-Solomon codes through binary decomposition and self concatenation

It has long been a challenge to coding theorists to devise an effective and practical soft-decision decoding algorithm for Reed-Solomon (RS) codes. Many attempts have been made and several MLD algorithms have been devised. Unfortunately, these algorithms can only be applied to very short codes, or codes with very small number of parity symbols. Several algebraic soft-decision algorithms based on reliability measures of received symbols have also been proposed. However, these algorithms either provide very small improvement over the pure algebraic decoding algorithms over the practical range of SNR or their decoding complexity grows exponentially with minimum distance of the code. This paper presents a two-stage scheme for turbo decoding RS codes through binary decomposition and self concatenation. This decoding scheme achieves an impressive error performance with a significant reduction in decoding complexity compared to previously proposed MLD algorithms, and can be applied to decode reasonably long RS codes.