Optimal erasure selection of M-ary PAM signaling for errors and erasures decoding algorithms

Erasure selection for errors-and-erasures decoding algorithms is investigated and analyzed, where declaring erasures provides additional gain for hard decision decoding. To derive an analytical criterion for optimal erasure selection, we first investigate erasure effects on decoding performance, by which a metric function for erasure selection is derived. From the derived metric, a suboptimal threshold is defined, which can be used for errors and erasures decoding of large code-distance channel codes. Moreover, application to M-ary (M>2) PAM constellation is also described. For verification of the proposed erasure threshold, simulation results with popular channel codes are included.