Improved Soft-aided Decoding of Product Codes with Adaptive Performance-Complexity Trade-off

TL;DR

This paper introduces an enhanced soft-aided decoding method for product codes that nearly matches the performance of traditional soft-decision decoding while maintaining low complexity and data flow, making it practical for real-world applications.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel soft-aided decoding scheme that significantly improves performance of product codes with minimal increase in complexity compared to hard decision decoders.

Findings

Achieves within 0.2 dB of soft-decision TPD performance

Maintains low complexity similar to hard decision decoders

Reduces internal data flow requirements

Abstract

We propose an improved soft-aided decoding scheme for product codes that approaches the decoding performance of conventional soft-decision TPD with only a 0.2 dB gap while keeping the complexity and internal decoder data flow similarly low as in hard decision decoders.