A concatenated code $\mathcal{C} $ based on an inner code with Hamming distance
di and an outer code with Hamming distance
do is considered. An outer decoder that corrects
ε errors and
θ erasures with high probability if
λε+θ≤do−1, where a real number
1<λ≤2 is the trade-off rate between errors and erasures for this decoder is used. In particular, an outer
l-punctured RS code, i.e., a code over the field
Fql of length
no<q with locators taken from the sub-field
Fq, where
l∈{1,2,…} is considered. In this case, the trade-off is given by
λ=1+1/l. An
m-trial decoder, where after inner decoding, in each trial we erase an incremental number of symbols and decode using the outer decoder is proposed. The optimal erasing strategy and the error correcting radii of both fixed and adaptive erasing decoders are given. Our approach extends results of Forney and Kovalev (obtained for
λ=2) to the whole given range of
λ. For the fixed erasing strategy the error correcting radius approaches
ρF≈2dido(1−2l−m) for large
do. For the adaptive erasing strategy, the error correcting radius
ρA≈2dido(1−l−2m) quickly approaches
dido/2 if
l or
m grows. The minimum number of trials required to reach an error correcting radius
dido/2 is
mA=21(logld+1). This means that
2 or
3 trials are sufficient in many practical cases if
l>1.
For a concatenated coding scheme using a single inner code, a single outer code, and an optimal single-trial decoding strategy, we study the guaranteed error correction rate, i.e., the number of correctable errors per transmitted symbol. In particular, it is investigated whether the optimal guaranteed error correction rate can be achieved by finite length codes or only be approached by an infinite sequence of codes of increasing lengths. It is shown that optimizing the guaranteed error correction rate for a given inner or outer code does not necessarily mean pushing the code rate to zero. Furthermore, to optimize the guaranteed error correction rate over all inner and outer codes of fixed dimensions and alphabets, the code rate of one (but not both) of these two codes should be pushed to zero.
In this chapter, we continue the discussion on concatenated codes, which was initiated in Section 5.4. The main message to be conveyed in this chapter is that by using concatenation, one can obtain codes with favorable asymptotic performance—in a sense to be quantified more precisely—while the complexity of constructing these codes and decoding them grows polynomially with the code length. We first present a decoding algorithm for concatenated codes, due to Forney. This algorithm, referred to as a generalized minimum distance (in short, GMD) decoder, corrects any error pattern whose Hamming weight is less than half the product of the minimum distances of the inner and outer codes (we recall that this product is a lower bound on the minimum distance of the respective concatenated code). A GMD decoder consists of a nearest-codeword decoder for the inner code, and a combined error–erasure decoder for the outer code. It then enumerates over a threshold value, marking the output of the inner decoder as erasure if that decoder returns an inner codeword whose Hamming distance from the respective received sub-word equals or exceeds that threshold. We show that under our assumption on the overall Hamming weight of the error word, there is at least one threshold for which the outer decoder recovers the correct codeword. If the outer code is taken as a GRS code, then a GMD decoder has an implementation with time complexity that is at most quadratic in the length of the concatenated code.
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 ε errors and τ erasures if ℓ+1/ ℓε+τ≤ do-1, where dois the minimum distance of the outer code and ℓ ∈ ℕ\{0}. 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.
We present a decoding algorithm for concatenated codes when the outer code is a Reed-Solomon code and the inner code is arbitrary. "Soft" information on the reliability of various symbols is passed by the inner decodings and exploited in the Reed-Solomon decoding. This is the first analysis of such a soft algorithm that works for arbitrary inner codes; prior analyses could only, handle some special inner codes. Crucial to our analysis is a combinatorial result on the coset weight distribution of codes given only its minimum distance. Our result enables us to decode essentially up to the "Johnson radius" of a concatenated code when the outer distance is large (the Johnson radius is the "a priori list decoding radius" of a code as a function of its distance). As a consequence, we are able to present simple and efficient constructions of q-ary linear codes that are list decodable up to a fraction (1 - 1/q - /spl epsiv/) of errors and have rate /spl Omega/(/spl epsiv//sup 6/). Codes that can correct such a large fraction of errors have found numerous complexity-theoretic applications. The previous constructions of linear codes with a similar rate used algebraic-geometric codes and thus suffered from a complicated construction and slow decoding.