Symbol level iterative soft decision decoder for Reed-Solomon codes based on parity-check equations

A symbol level iterative soft decision (SD) algorithm for ReedSolomon codes based on parity-check equations is developed. This is achieved by transforming the systematic parity-check matrix according to some rules. The rules are based on the soft reliability information matrix derived from the received vector. The symbol error rate performance of the resulting algorithm is documented through computer simulation and compared with the hard decision Berlekamp-Massey (B-M) algorithm, and the Koetter and Vardy-Guruswami and Sudan (KV-GS) algorithm. The result verifies that the iterative (SD) algorithm outperforms the KV-GS and B-M algorithms by a significant margin while maintaining a reasonable decoding time complexity level.