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

Using a generating function approach, a computationally tractable expression is derived to predict the frame error rate arising at the output of the binary symmetric channel when a number of outer Reed–Solomon codes are concatenated with a number of inner Bose–Ray-Chaudhuri–Hocquenghem codes, thereby obviating the need for time-consuming Monte Carlo simulations. Measuring (a) code performance via the gap to the Shannon limit, (b) decoding complexity via an estimate of the number of operations per decoded bit, and © decoding latency by the overall frame length, a code search is performed to determine the Pareto frontier for performance-complexity-latency trade-offs.