Concatenated Code Designs withOuter Interleaved Reed-Solomon Codes and Inner Tailbiting Convolutional Codes

Abstract:
Concatenated Code Designs with outer Interleaved Reed–Solomon (IRS) codes and inner convolutional codes are applied in various technical communication standards like the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) Telemetry channel coding standard, the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) standards as well as in the Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) standard. In this paper, we present a variant of the CCSDS coding scheme, which uses tailbiting convolutional codes instead of one single convolutional code to protect the symbols of the outer IRS code. This modified coding scheme possesses the same code parameters as the original CCSDS scheme, but the special error patterns obtained from the inner decoder allow for using collaborative strategies for decoding the outer IRS code beyond half the minimum distance.