Interleaved Reed-Solomon codes in concatenated code designs

Interleaved Reed-Solomon codes allow the correction of errors beyond half the minimum code distance if the errors are not distributed independently in the received signal but occur in bursts. Therefore, these codes are mainly considered for applications in channels, that cause correlated error patterns, i.e., error bursts. However, they can also be quite interesting for memoryless channels causing independent random errors, if they are applied in concatenated code designs. We present such concatenated codes with several outer Reed-Solomon codewords and demonstrate the gain, that can be obtained by interleaved Reed-Solomon decoding in comparison to independently decoding the several words of the underlying Reed-Solomon codes.