Performance of simple cross-interleaved Reed-Solomon decoding strategies for compact disc players

The complexity and performance of three simple error detection and correction strategies frequently used for the decoding of the cross-interleaved Reed-Solomon codes in digital compact disc ( CD) are compared. It is assumed that the number of byte errors in the input codeword is always a multiple of l a positive integer. By varying l from 1 to 32, the random to burst error performance of the various strategies is obtained. Specifically, it is shown that unless random errors are the main cause of concern, the best strategies seem to be those using erasure corrections. The results presented will be useful for deciding the decoding strategies to be adopted for CD players as well as in potential applications such as optical mass storage devices using the CD format