Asymptotic single-trial strategies for GMD decoding with arbitrary error-erasure tradeoff

Generalized minimum distance (GMD) decoders allow for combining some virtues of probabilistic and algebraic decoding approaches at a low complexity. We investigate single-trial strategies for GMD decoding with arbitrary error-erasure tradeoff, based on either erasing a fraction of the received symbols or erasing all symbols whose reliability values are below a certain threshold. The fraction/threshold may be either static or adaptive, where adaptive means that the erasing is a function of the channel output. Adaptive erasing based on a threshold is a new technique that has not been investigated before. An asymptotic approach is used to evaluate the error-correction radius for each strategy. Both known and new results appear as special cases of this general framework.