A Soft-Aided Staircase Decoder Using Three-Level Channel Reliabilities

The soft-aided bit-marking (SABM) algorithm is based on the idea of marking bits as highly reliable (HRBs), unreliable (HUBs), and uncertain to improve performance hard-decision (HD) decoders. HRBs HUBs are used assist HD decoder prevent miscorrections decode those originally uncorrectable cases via bit flipping (BF), respectively. In this paper, an improved SABM (called iSABM) proposed for staircase codes (SCCs). Similar SABM, iSABM marks with help channel reliabilities, i.e., using absolute values log-likelihood ratios. improvements offered by include: (i) being classified a reliability threshold, (ii) BF randomly selecting HUBs, (iii) decoding over multiple SCC blocks. complexity comparable that SABM. This due fact one hand no sorting required (lower complexity) because use threshold while other blocks soft information (higher complexity). gains achieved up 0.53 dB respect 0.91 standard SCCs at error rate $10^{-6}$ . Furthermore, it shown 1-bit marking, only having causes gain penalty 0.25 significantly reduced memory requirement.