Evaluation of efficient trellis methods for soft decision decoding of Reed-Solomon codes

Various novel trellis decoding methods are suggested that make it easy to incorporate soft decision methods for Reed-Solomon codes. For each decoding method the advantages and disadvantages are pointed out. The performance and computational efficiency of each decoder are estimated using simulation on an AWGN channel. From the simulation results the best of these trellis decoding schemes is suggested for particular codes and particular applications