Soft decision decoding of Reed-Solomon codes

This paper presents a maximum-likelihood decoding (MLD) and a suboptimum decoding algorithm for Reed-Solomon (RS) codes. The proposed algorithms are based on the algebraic structure of the binary images of RS codes. Theoretical bounds on the performance are derived and shown to be consistent with simulation results. The proposed suboptimum algorithm achieves near-MLD performance with significantly lower decoding complexity. It is also shown that the proposed suboptimum, algorithm has better performance compared with generalized minimum distance decoding, while the proposed MLD algorithm has significantly lower decoding complexity than the well-known Vardy-Be´ery (1991) MLD algorithm.