Low complexity decoding of Reed–Solomon codes over magnetic recording channels

A low complexity soft-decision decoding technique is presented for Reed–Solomon codes, over magnetic recording channels (MRC), by considering symbol and bit reliability, jointly. A symbol detection scheme for burst error scenarios has been put forward for the iterative error-and-erasure decoding algorithm (IEED), which is based on multiple trials, and is a combination of the generalised minimum distance and Chase-2 decoding schemes. In order to decrease complexity, the decoding test patterns are used in a certain order, while the stopping criteria is also discussed. Simulations show that the proposed algorithms can achieve almost the same performance as that of IEED for the additive white Gaussian noise channel and slightly better performance in MRC, but with significantly less complexity.