Reed-Solomon Decoding Algorithms for Digital Audio Broadcasting in the AM Band

Digital audio broadcasting (DAB) systems for the AM band are being developed to provide higher-quality radio broadcasts, broader coverage, and data services. Transmission is typically done by means of multistreaming with OFDM in the ghihg bits/sec/Hz regime, in which Reed-Solomon codes, either alone or in concatenation with inner trellis coded modulation (TCM), are natural choices fro error control. For the AM DAB application, Reed-Solomon codes with suboptimal decoders of the bounded-distance type offer error correction important for bringing down the error probability, but also offers error detection capability important for generating block detected-error flags for use in the error concealment, or error mitigation, algorithm in the auido decoder. For multistream systems, the block detected-error flags can also be used to select the component streams retained by the audio decoder.