Interleaved Reed-Solomon Codes versus Interleaved Hermitian Codes

Recently, Bleichenbacher et. al. introduced a collaborative decoding technique to jointly decode the constituent Reed-Solomon (RS) codes of an interleaved RS code. Brown et. al. subsequently generalized their approach to decode interleaved algebraic geometry codes. We identify when interleaved Hermitian codes enable recovery from more errors compared to interleaved RS codes of the same length, rate and alphabet size, under the aforementioned collaborative decoding schemes. Our investigations consider a wide range of code rates and alphabet sizes as well as codelengths of practical interest.