Abstract

Efficient and reliable transmission of data has become a necessity today for any communication system. This transmission depends on the reliable transport of information between a source and a destination. Researchers are left with the task of finding an appropriate trade-off between performance and complexity. While the decoding of turbo codes, specifically block turbo codes, is already deemed to be performant, it is possible to improve this performance while not rendering the communication system overly complex. This thesis presents an iterative soft-decision decoding algorithm for Reed-Solomon product codes. This algorithm differs from existing ones in the method it uses for selecting competing codewords, used for the soft-input soft-output iterative decoder. Selection of these codewords is based on the notion of suboptimum soft-decision decoding which will be discussed in detail.