Adaptive Reed-Solomon decoding using Gao´s algorithm

Gao´s algorithm for decoding Reed-Solomon codes is considered here. This algorithm is a new algorithm that computes the message polynomial estimate directly without explicitly finding error locations or error magnitudes. A generalized-minimum-distance (GMD) decoding procedure is used in conjunction with Gao´s algorithm for efficiently decoding Reed-Solomon codes. It is shown here that the decoder polynomial only has to be slightly modified as the number of erasures is increased for each step of the generalized-minimum-distance decoding.