Performance evaluation of the Reed Solomon and low density parity check codes for Blu-ray disk channels

In this paper, we evaluate the performances of the Reed-Solomon (RS) and low density parity check (LDPC) codes in order to propose an efficient coding system for the outer code in high density optical recording channels. Hard decision decoding (HDD) RS code, iterative soft decision decoding (SDD) RS code or LDPC code is used as the outer code and LDPC code is used as the inner code. We compare the bit error rate (BER) performance of each coding system for various code rates, code lengths and burst errors. Simulation results show that the LDPC code has a better BER performance than the HDD RS and iterative SDD RS codes as the outer code in high density optical channels. Therefore, the LDPC code could be more attractive as the outer code than the RS code in high density optical channels.