Iterative soft-decision decoding of reed-solomon codes of prime lengths

A novel scheme is presented for encoding and decoding of Reed-Solomon codes of prime lengths. Encoding is performed on a collection of codewords which are mapped through Galois Fourier transform into a codeword in a low-density parity-check code with a binary parity-check matrix for transmission. Using this matrix, a binary iterative soft-decision decoding algorithm is applied to jointly decode a collection of codewords in the Reed-Solomon code. By allowing information sharing among the received vectors corresponding to the code-words in the collection, the proposed decoding scheme achieves superior performance over algorithms decoding individual Reed-Solomon codewords including maximum likelihood decoding.