Soft-Decision Low-Complexity Chase Decoders for the RS(255,239) Code

[EN] In this work, we present a new architecture for soft-decision Reed-Solomon (RS) Low-Complexity Chase (LCC) decoding. The proposed architecture is scalable and can be used for a high number of test vectors. We propose a novel Multiplicity Assignment stage that sorts and stores only the location of the errors inside the symbols and the powers of a that identify the positions of the symbols in the frame. Novel schematics for the Syndrome Update and Symbol Modification blocks that are adapted to the proposed sorting stage are also presented. We also propose novel solutions for the problems that arise when a high number of test vectors is processed. We implemented three decoders: a h = 4 LCC decoder and two decoders that only decode 31 and 60 test vectors of true h = 5 and h = 6 LCC decoders, respectively. For example, our h = 4 decoder requires 29% less look-up tables in Virtex-V Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices than the best soft-decision RS decoder published to date, while has a 0.07 dB coding gain over that decoder.This research was funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad and FEDER grant number TEC2015-70858-C2-2-RTorres Carot, V.; Valls Coquillat, J.; Canet Subiela, MJ.; García Herrero, FM. (2019). Soft-Decision Low-Complexity Chase Decoders for the RS(255,239) Code. Electronics. 8(1):1-13. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics8010010S11381Cideciyan, R., Gustlin, M., Li, M., Wang, J., & Wang, Z. (2013). Next generation backplane and copper cable challenges. IEEE Communications Magazine, 51(12), 130-136. doi:10.1109/mcom.2013.6685768Koetter, R., & Vardy, A. (2003). Algebraic soft-decision decoding of reed-solomon codes. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 49(11), 2809-2825. doi:10.1109/tit.2003.819332Sudan, M. (1997). 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Advanced channel coding techniques using bit-level soft information

In this dissertation, advanced channel decoding techniques based on bit-level soft information are studied. Two main approaches are proposed: bit-level probabilistic iterative decoding and bit-level algebraic soft-decision (list) decoding (ASD). In the first part of the dissertation, we first study iterative decoding for high density parity check (HDPC) codes. An iterative decoding algorithm, which uses the sum product algorithm (SPA) in conjunction with a binary parity check matrix adapted in each decoding iteration according to the bit-level reliabilities is proposed. In contrast to the common belief that iterative decoding is not suitable for HDPC codes, this bit-level reliability based adaptation procedure is critical to the conver-gence behavior of iterative decoding for HDPC codes and it significantly improves the iterative decoding performance of Reed-Solomon (RS) codes, whose parity check matrices are in general not sparse. We also present another iterative decoding scheme for cyclic codes by randomly shifting the bit-level reliability values in each iteration. The random shift based adaptation can also prevent iterative decoding from getting stuck with a significant complexity reduction compared with the reliability based parity check matrix adaptation and still provides reasonable good performance for short-length cyclic codes. In the second part of the dissertation, we investigate ASD for RS codes using bit-level soft information. In particular, we show that by carefully incorporating bit¬level soft information in the multiplicity assignment and the interpolation step, ASD can significantly outperform conventional hard decision decoding (HDD) for RS codes with a very small amount of complexity, even though the kernel of ASD is operating at the symbol-level. More importantly, the performance of the proposed bit-level ASD can be tightly upper bounded for practical high rate RS codes, which is in general not possible for other popular ASD schemes. Bit-level soft-decision decoding (SDD) serves as an efficient way to exploit the potential gain of many classical codes, and also facilitates the corresponding per-formance analysis. The proposed bit-level SDD schemes are potential and feasible alternatives to conventional symbol-level HDD schemes in many communication sys-tems

Iterative Soft Input Soft Output Decoding of Reed-Solomon Codes by Adapting the Parity Check Matrix

An iterative algorithm is presented for soft-input-soft-output (SISO) decoding of Reed-Solomon (RS) codes. The proposed iterative algorithm uses the sum product algorithm (SPA) in conjunction with a binary parity check matrix of the RS code. The novelty is in reducing a submatrix of the binary parity check matrix that corresponds to less reliable bits to a sparse nature before the SPA is applied at each iteration. The proposed algorithm can be geometrically interpreted as a two-stage gradient descent with an adaptive potential function. This adaptive procedure is crucial to the convergence behavior of the gradient descent algorithm and, therefore, significantly improves the performance. Simulation results show that the proposed decoding algorithm and its variations provide significant gain over hard decision decoding (HDD) and compare favorably with other popular soft decision decoding methods.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures, final version accepted by IEEE Trans. on Information Theor

Iterative Algebraic Soft-Decision List Decoding of Reed-Solomon Codes

In this paper, we present an iterative soft-decision decoding algorithm for Reed-Solomon codes offering both complexity and performance advantages over previously known decoding algorithms. Our algorithm is a list decoding algorithm which combines two powerful soft decision decoding techniques which were previously regarded in the literature as competitive, namely, the Koetter-Vardy algebraic soft-decision decoding algorithm and belief-propagation based on adaptive parity check matrices, recently proposed by Jiang and Narayanan. Building on the Jiang-Narayanan algorithm, we present a belief-propagation based algorithm with a significant reduction in computational complexity. We introduce the concept of using a belief-propagation based decoder to enhance the soft-input information prior to decoding with an algebraic soft-decision decoder. Our algorithm can also be viewed as an interpolation multiplicity assignment scheme for algebraic soft-decision decoding of Reed-Solomon codes.Comment: Submitted to IEEE for publication in Jan 200

On Multiple Decoding Attempts for Reed-Solomon Codes: A Rate-Distortion Approach

One popular approach to soft-decision decoding of Reed-Solomon (RS) codes is based on using multiple trials of a simple RS decoding algorithm in combination with erasing or flipping a set of symbols or bits in each trial. This paper presents a framework based on rate-distortion (RD) theory to analyze these multiple-decoding algorithms. By defining an appropriate distortion measure between an error pattern and an erasure pattern, the successful decoding condition, for a single errors-and-erasures decoding trial, becomes equivalent to distortion being less than a fixed threshold. Finding the best set of erasure patterns also turns into a covering problem which can be solved asymptotically by rate-distortion theory. Thus, the proposed approach can be used to understand the asymptotic performance-versus-complexity trade-off of multiple errors-and-erasures decoding of RS codes. This initial result is also extended a few directions. The rate-distortion exponent (RDE) is computed to give more precise results for moderate blocklengths. Multiple trials of algebraic soft-decision (ASD) decoding are analyzed using this framework. Analytical and numerical computations of the RD and RDE functions are also presented. Finally, simulation results show that sets of erasure patterns designed using the proposed methods outperform other algorithms with the same number of decoding trials.Comment: to appear in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (Special Issue on Facets of Coding Theory: from Algorithms to Networks