Decoding strategies for reed-solomon product codes

Abstract

Reed-Solomon(RS) product codes, where RS codes are taken as elementary inner (row) and outer (column) codes, are extensively used for error control coding in digital recoding systems. We present an analytic expression for the undetected error probability, Pud, and the probability of decoding failure at the outer (column) decoder, Pdf, for both the random and bursty noise channel. The bursty noise channel is modeled by a two-state Markov chain. We propose two decoding schemes for RS product codes and evaluate their performances. It has been found that the proposed decoding schemes produce better performance than the conventional decoding scheme.