Soft-decision decoding of Reed-Solomon codes

This paper proposes a new soft-decision decoding procedure for the Reed-Solomon code. As the first step, the reliability function for the decoded estimation symbol is defined. To determine the estimated symbol and the reliability efficiently, an open trellis diagram is proposed from which the candidates for the estimated symbol, as well as the respective likelihoods, can be determined. Then, a new decoding procedure is proposed, by which the decoding error rate can be reduced by effectively utilizing the reliability. Lastly, the performance of the defined reliability function is evaluated by a computer simulation, and the effectiveness of the reliability function is verified. The proposed decoding method and the traditional decoding methods are compared, and the effectiveness of the proposed decoding method is verified. (C) 1999 Scripta Technica.