An Architectural Comparison of Reed-Solomon Soft-Decoding Algorithms

Reed-Solomon codes are used as error-correcting codes in diverse communication system applications. The decoding performance of traditional hard-decision Reed-Solomon decoders can be improved via the use of soft-decoding algorithms such as generalized minimum distance decoding, algebraic soft-decision decoding, and ordered statistics decoding. While it is relatively straight-forward to compare the decoding performance of these algorithms, it is harder to compare their hardware complexity. This is because an efficient architecture has a dramatic effect on the final implementation complexity. In this paper, we present efficient hardware architectures for each of the soft-decoding algorithms and compare their implementation complexity.