Performance and Maximum-Likelihood Bounds for Reed-Solomon Codes on Partial-Response Channels

The authors presents computation of ML bounds for RS decoding performance for realistic channels and codes. The ABP gains a fraction of a dB over HD decoding, and the idealized ABP results suggest that further refinement of the bit-selection algorithm might provide a fraction of a dB gain. However, this is not enough to get within a dB or so of the ML bound. To achieve this, some algorithm other than ABP seems necessary.