New concatenated soft decoding of Reed-Solomon codes with lower complexities

To improve error-correcting performance, an iterative concatenated soft decoding algorithm for Reed-Solomon (RS) codes is presented in this article. This algorithm brings both complexity as well as advantages in performance over presently popular soft decoding algorithms. The proposed algorithm consists of two powerful soft decoding techniques, adaptive belief propagation (ABP) and box and match algorithm (BMA), which are serially concatenated by the accumulated log-likelihood ratio (ALLR). Simulation results show that, compared with ABP and ABP-BMA algorithms, the proposed algorithm can bring more decoding gains and a better tradeoff between the decoding performance and complexity.