The performance of algebraic soft-decision decoding of Reed-Solomon codes using bit-level soft information is investigated. Optimal multiplicity assignment strategies of algebraic soft-decision decoding with infinite cost are first studied over erasure channels and the binary symmetric channel. The corresponding decoding radii are calculated in closed forms and tight bounds on the error probability are derived. The multiplicity assignment strategy and the corresponding performance analysis are then generalized to characterize the decoding region of algebraic softdecision decoding over a mixed error and bit-level erasure channel. The bit-level decoding region of the proposed multiplicity assignment strategy is shown to be significantly larger than that of conventional Berlekamp-Massey decoding. As an application, a bit-level generalized minimum distance decoding algorithm is proposed. The proposed decoding compares favorably with many other Reed-Solomon soft-decision decoding algorithms over various channels. Moreover, owing to the simplicity of the proposed bit-level generalized minimum distance decoding, its performance can be tightly bounded using order statistics.

32 pages, 12 figures, to appear in IEEE Trans. on Information Theory