Performance of a general decoding technique over the class of randomly chosen parity check codes

The paper extends a general decoding technique developed by Metzner and Kapturowski (1990) for concatenated code outer codes and for file disagreement location. That work showed the ability to correct most cases of d-2 or fewer erroneous block symbols, where d is the outer code minimum distance. Any parity check code can be used as the basis for the outer codes, and yet decoding complexity increases at most as the third power of the code length. In this correspondence, it is shown that, with a slight modification and no significant increase in complexity, the general decoding technique can be applied to the correction of many other cases beyond the code minimum distance. By considering average performance over all binary randomly chosen codes, it is seen that most error patterns of t_M or fewer block errors can be corrected, where: 1) t_M in most cases is much greater than the code minimum distance, and 2) asymptotically, the ratio of t_M to the theoretical maximum (the number of parity symbol blocks) approaches 1. Moreover, most cases of noncorrectable error block patterns are detected