Multitrial decoding of concatenated Reed-Solomon codes

Decoding strategies based on ordered statistics have proven to be powerful in decoding binary linear block codes. However, for q-ary codes, the existing decoding methods are not suited very well, since the required reprocessing steps, which try all possible changes in several code symbols, cause a high computational complexity. This complexity can be reduced by using short lists of the most reliable symbols instead of trying all q possibilities. In this paper we investigate, in which situations such short lists are most effective and how they should be applied to improve the decoding performance. We present a decoding method for a simple concatenated scheme, in which we create lists by the decoder of a binary inner code and apply them to the q-ary symbols of an outer Reed-Solomon code.