Decoding Staircase Codes with Marked Bits

Staircase codes (SCCs) are typically decoded using iterative bounded-distance decoding (BDD) and hard decisions. In this paper, a novel decoding algorithm is proposed, which partially uses soft information from the channel. The proposed algorithm is based on marking certain number of highly reliable and highly unreliable bits. These marked bits are used to improve the miscorrection-detection capability of the SCC decoder and the error-correcting capability of BDD. For SCCs with $2$-error-correcting BCH component codes, our algorithm improves upon standard SCC decoding by up to $0.30$~dB at a bit-error rate of $10^{-7}$. The proposed algorithm is shown to achieve almost half of the gain achievable by an idealized decoder with this structure.