Soft-decision decoding of Reed-Muller codes as generalized multiple concatenated codes

Constructs Reed-Muller codes by generalized multiple concatenation of binary block codes of length 2. As a consequence of this construction, a new decoding procedure is derived that uses soft-decision information. The algorithm is designed for low decoding complexity and is applicable to all Reed-Muller codes. It gives better decoding performance than soft-decision bounded-distance decoding. Its decoding complexity is much lower than that of maximum-likelihood trellis decoding of Reed-Muller codes, especially for long codes