Iterative soft decoding of Reed-Solomon codes using information correction

A new iterative soft decision decoding method with very low complexity for Reed-Solomon (RS) codes is proposed. This method is based on bit level belief propagation (BP) decoding. In order to make BP decoding effective for RS codes, we use an extended binary parity check matrix with a lower density and reduced number of 4-cycles compared to the original binary parity check matrix of the code. Our proposed method is based on information correction in BP decoding. It means that we determine least reliable bits and by changing their channel information, the convergence of the decoder is improved. Our method results in considerable performance improvement of RS codes compared to hard decision decoding. The performance is also superior or comparable to some popular soft decision decoding methods.