An efficient hybrid decoding algorithm for Reed-Solomon codes based on bit reliability

The paper presents a computationally efficient hybrid reliability-based decoding algorithm for Reed-Solomon (RS) codes. This hybrid decoding algorithm consists of two major components, a re-encoding process and a successive erasure-and-error decoding process for both bit and symbol levels. The re-encoding process is to generate a sequence of candidate codewords based on the information provided by the codeword decoded by an algebraic decoder and a set of test error patterns. Two criteria are used for testing in the decoding process to reduce the decoding computational complexity. The first criterion is devised to reduce the number of re-encoding operations by eliminating the unlikely error patterns. The second criterion is to test the optimality of a generated candidate codeword. Numerical results show that the proposed decoding algorithm can achieve either a near-optimum error performance or an asymptotically optimum error performance.