Iterative soft decision decoding of Reed Solomon codes based on adaptive parity check matrices

We present a soft decision decoding algorithm for Reed Solomon (RS) codes using their binary image representations. The novelty of the proposed decoding algorithm is in reducing the submatrix corresponding to the less reliable bits to a sparse nature prior to each decoding iteration and in adapting the parity check matrix from one iteration to another. Simulation results show that the new method provides significant gain over hard decision decoding (HDD) and compares favorably with other popular soft decision decoding methods [R. Koetter et al., 2003].