Soft-in soft-out decoding of Reed-Solomon codes based on Vardy and Be´ery´s decomposition

This correspondence presents an optimal soft-in soft-out (SISO) decoding algorithm for the binary image of Reed-Solomon (RS) codes that is based on Vardy and Be´ery´s optimal soft-in hard-out algorithm. A novel suboptimal list-based SISO decoder that exploits Vardy and Be´ery´s decomposition is also presented. For those codes with very high rate, which allows practical decoding with the proposed algorithms, the proposed suboptimal SISO significantly outperforms standard list-based decoding techniques in iteratively decoded systems.