We investigate threshold-based multi-trial decoding of concatenated codes
with an inner Maximum-Likelihood decoder and an outer error/erasure
(L+1)/L-extended Bounded Distance decoder, i.e. a decoder which corrects e
errors and t erasures if e(L+1)/L + t <= d - 1, where d is the minimum distance
of the outer code and L is a positive integer. This is a generalization of
Forney's GMD decoding, which was considered only for L = 1, i.e. outer Bounded
Minimum Distance decoding. One important example for (L+1)/L-extended Bounded
Distance decoders is decoding of L-Interleaved Reed-Solomon codes. Our main
contribution is a threshold location formula, which allows to optimally erase
unreliable inner decoding results, for a given number of decoding trials and
parameter L. Thereby, the term optimal means that the residual codeword error
probability of the concatenated code is minimized. We give an estimation of
this probability for any number of decoding trials.Comment: Accepted for the 2010 IEEE International Symposium on Information
Theory, Austin, TX, USA, June 13 - 18, 2010. 5 pages, 2 figure