Soft decision decoding of Reed Solomon codes

Abstract

The paper presents a maximum likelihood decoding (MLD) and a sub-optimum decoding algorithm for Reed-Solomon codes. The proposed algorithms are based on the algebraic structure of RS codes represented in GF(2). Theoretical bounds on the performance are derived and shown to be accurate. The proposed sub-optimum algorithm is seen to have better error performance compared to other sub-optimum decoding algorithms while the new MLD algorithm has significantly lower decoding complexity when compared to other MLD algorithms.