An on-the-fly decoding technique for Reed-Solomon codes

An on-the-fly error correction technique for double-byte-error-correction (DBEC) and triple-byte-error-detection (TBED) Reed-Solomon (RS) codes is presented in this paper. This new algorithm finds number of byte-errors (single byte-error, double-byte errors, and triple-byte errors) by simply testing the values of a few syndrome functions, and locates and corrects the byte-errors directly without using the standard iterative algorithms for finding the error location polynomial. More importantly, it neither suffers from malfunctions incurred in Deng-Costello algorithm (1987), nor requires syndrome re-calculation as in Koksal-Yucel´s modification (1992). It is also much more simpler and faster than the original Deng-Costello algorithm. It has found applications in high-end disk drives where powerful on-the-fly correction is necessary