Low-Complexity Soft-Aided Error-and-Erasure Decoding for Generalized Product Codes

Generalized product codes (GPCs) combine excellent high-rate performance with low-complexity hardware implementations. We propose the refined dynamic reliability score decoder (\acs{RDRSD}), a hard-message-passing iterative error-and-erasure decoder that uses dynamic reliability scores. Its syndrome-domain implementation has complexity comparable to hard-decision \ac{iBDD}. Across various GPCs and decoding configurations, \acs{RDRSD} provides different complexity–performance trade-offs and achieves approximately \SI{1}{dB} coding gain over \ac{iBDD}. For GPCs with component codes of small error-correcting capability, we also analyze the error floor and propose a soft-aided post-processing step that significantly lowers it.