Blind frame synchronization of reed-solomon codes: Non-binary VS. binary approach

We consider in this paper the problem of blind frame synchronization of systems using Reed-Solomon (RS) codes and other related families. We present first of all three techniques of blind frame synchronization based on the non-binary parity check matrix of RS codes. While the first two techniques involve the calculation of hard and soft values of the syndrome elements respectively, the third one perform an adaptation step of the parity check matrix before applying the soft criterion. Although RS codes are constructed from non-binary symbols, we show in this paper that it is also possible to synchronize them using the binary image expansion of their parity check matrix. Simulation results show that the synchronization algorithm based on the adaptation of the binary parity check matrix of RS codes has the best synchronization performance among all other techniques. Furthermore, the Frame Error Rate (FER) curves obtained after synchronization and decoding are very close to the perfect synchronization curves.