Hybrid soft decision hard decision Reed Solomon decoding

摘要

Embodiments in accordance with the invention utilize Reed Solomon (RS) forward error correction (FEC) in conjunction with M-ary Bandwidth Efficient Modulation (BEM) schemes and soft decision decoding to improve the robustness of high spectral efficiency communication links. In one embodiment, information symbols in communication data blocks are encoded utilizing Reed Solomon (RS) forward error correction (FEC) coding and transmitted with either M-ary phase shift keying (MPSK) or M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (MQAM). Using standard Reed Solomon (RS) hard decision decoding, a receiver either correctly decodes the received block or returns a decoding failure. In the event of a decoding failure, soft decision reliability information is used to identify received code symbols with a low probability of being correctly received and to generate new code symbol estimates that are used in the traditional Reed Solomon decoding algorithm.