Performance of Reed-Solomon block turbo code

Thanks to recent progress in the iterative decoding of concatenated codes, several new fields of investigation have appeared. In this paper, we present a first approach of the iterative decoding of Reed-Solomon (RS) product codes: “Turbo codes RS”. Two methods to construct RS product codes are given. The iterative decoding of the RS product codes is based on the soft decoding and the soft decision of the component codes. The performance of RS turbo codes have been evaluated on the Gaussian and Rayleigh channels using Monte Carlo simulation. Coding gains up to 5.5 dB for a BER (bit error rate) of 10 ^-5 have been obtained on the Gaussian channel. This new coding scheme is very attractive for data storage applications where the RS product codes are often used