Performance-Complexity-Latency Trade-offs of Concatenated RS-SDBCH Codes

TL;DR

This paper develops a semi-analytical method to evaluate and optimize the performance, complexity, and latency trade-offs of concatenated RS-SDBCH coding schemes with multilevel modulation over AWGN channels.

Contribution

It introduces a semi-analytical FER estimation formula enabling efficient code search for optimal trade-offs, reducing reliance on simulation.

Findings

Identified codes with near-Shannon-limit performance at low FER

Demonstrated trade-offs between complexity and latency for various codes

Provided a framework for code optimization without extensive simulations

Abstract

Concatenated bit-interleaved and multilevel coded modulation with outer Reed--Solomon codes, inner Chase-algorithm-based soft-decision-decoded Bose--Ray-Chaudhuri--Hocquenghem codes, and four-level pulse amplitude modulation is considered. A semi-analytical formula is derived for estimating the decoded frame error rate (FER) at the output of the additive white Gaussian noise channel, obviating the need for time-consuming Monte Carlo simulations. The formula is used to search a large space of codes (including the KP4 code) to find those achieving good trade-offs among performance (measured by the gap to the constrained Shannon limit at $10^{-13}$ FER), complexity (measured by the number of elementary decoder operations), and latency (measured by overall block length).