Decoding of serial concatenated codes using erasure patterns

Abstract

A method of processing a received concatenated code codeword is disclosed, the concatenated code codeword comprising a plurality of inner code codewords and one or more outer code codewords, each inner code codeword comprising symbols, from each outer code codeword comprising one or more information symbols and one or more parity symbols, the parity symbols in each outer code codeword corresponding to the parity check equations of the outer code. The method comprises (i) decoding the received concatenated code codeword; (ii) erasing a subset of the received inner code codewords; and (iii) determining a replacement inner code codeword to replace each of the erased inner code codewords to provide a candidate concatenated code codeword. A preferred method further comprises (iv) erasing a further, different subset of the received inner code codewords; (v) determining further replacement inner code codewords to replace each of the thus erased inner code codewords to provide a further candidate concatenated code codeword; and (vi) determining the candidate concatenated code codeword having the highest correlation with the received vector of the decoded concatenated code codeword. A system for performing the method is also disclosed.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.