Improving performance of Reed-Solomon decoder by error/erasure correction

In this paper, we introduce a new scheme to improve the performance of the Reed-Solomon codes, which exploits the properties of the Reed-Solomon (RS) decoder to correct more errors by predicting as many erasures as possible in each RS packet in advance before decoding in the RS decoder. The concept Depth of Prediction (DoP) used for predicting erasures is introduced and derived. Simulation results show that with optimal DoP values, the new scheme yields performance gain of around ldB at BER of 10^-8 resulting in the extended coverage area of the communication system.