Enhanced Anchor Decoder for Staircase Codes With Hard Reliability Scores

In this letter, we propose an enhanced anchor decoding (AD) algorithm for staircase codes with hard reliability scores (HRSs). We use the following two observations on the decoding results of the iterative bounded distance decoding (BDD) to assign the HRSs. Firstly, the miscorrection probability increases with the number of erroneous bits detected by the BDD. Secondly, the miscorrection probability of an anchor is low when the affected codewords due to error corrections of this anchor are also anchors. Most miscorrections can be reliably detected and prevented by using HRSs. The simulation results show that, for a staircase code based on the two-error-correcting Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) code, the enhanced AD algorithm performs 0.11 dB better than the AD algorithm at a bit error rate of 10−7.