IHDD-GRAND Algorithm for Decoding Symmetric Block-Wise Concatenated BCH Codes

Block-wise concatenated Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BC-BCH) codes are shown to have excellent error-correcting capability under hard-decision decoding. The variant of BC-BCH codes, namely symmetric BC-BCH (SBC-BCH) codes, is later introduced to improve the error-correcting performance of BC-BCH codes. In this work, we propose a new hard-decision algorithm, IHDD-GRAND, which aims to further enhance the error-rate of SBC-BCH codes. The proposed algorithm uses GRAND as an auxiliary decoder for the IHDD, and it can be efficiently implemented by utilizing the error-confinement property of SBC-BCH codes. It will be shown that the proposed algorithm significantly improves the error-correcting performance of SBC-BCH codes.