Exponential error bounds for algebraic soft-decision decoding of Reed-Solomon codes

Algebraic soft-decision decoding of Reed-Solomon codes is a promising technique for exploiting reliability information in the decoding process. While the algorithmic aspects of the decoding algorithm are reasonably well understood and, in particular, complexity is polynomially bounded in the length of the code, the performance analysis has relied almost entirely on simulation results. Analytical exponential error bounds that can be used to tightly bound the performance of Reed-Solomon codes under algebraic soft-decision decoding are presented in this paper. The analysis is used in a number of examples and several extensions and consequences of the results are presented.