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 (c) decoding latency by the overall frame length, a code search is performed to determine the Pareto frontier for performance-complexity-latency trade-offs.