A New Soft Decision Algorithm for Reed-Solomon Codes

"We propose an efficient soft-decision decoding algorithm for Reed-Solomon codes, called symbol substitution decoding (SSD), that supplies the algebraic decoder with a set of candidate sequences. The algebraic decoder generates a set of candidate codewords and the most likely codeword is chosen as the transmitted codeword. SSD outperforms successive erasures decoding (SED) and generalized minimum distance decoding (GMD). SSD can approach the performance of maximum-likelihood decoding (MLD) when the number of candidate sequences increases."