A Chase-type algorithm for soft-decision Reed-Solomon decoding on Rayleigh fading channels

A soft-decision Reed-Solomon decoding algorithm has been proposed by Koetter and Vardy, which provides a significant coding gain by utilizing channel output reliability information. In this paper we present a Chase-type soft-decision algorithm which provides additional gains at the expense of a small increase in complexity. We evaluate the performance of this decoding algorithm on additive white Gaussian noise channel and Rayleigh fading channels. Simulation results show that coding gains on the order of several dB can be achieved on uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channels over traditional hard-decision Reed-Solomon decoding algorithms.