Adaptive and iterative soft-decision list decoding

An efficient adaptive list decoder for Reed-Solomon (RS) codes by adaptively adjusting the list size is presented. Simulations show that it performs better than the Koetter-Vardy decoder (KVD) for small list sizes, with only a marginal increase in complexity. For larger list sizes, we propose an iterative decoder which, when applied to a parallel concatenated RS code, performs significantly better than the KVD, applied to an RS code of the same rate.