Limits to List Decoding Reed–Solomon Codes

  • Authors:
  • V. Guruswami;A. Rudra

  • Affiliations:
  • Dept. of Comput. Sci. & Eng., Univ. of Washington, Seattle, WA;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
  • Year:
  • 2006

Quantified Score

Hi-index 754.96

Visualization

Abstract

In this paper, we prove the following two results that expose some combinatorial limitations to list decoding Reed-Solomon codes. 1) Given n distinct elements alpha1,...,alphan from a field F, and n subsets S1,...,Sn of F, each of size at most l, the list decoding algorithm of Guruswami and Sudan can in polynomial time output all polynomials p of degree at most k that satisfy p(alphai)isinSi for every i, as long as l0 (agreement of k is trivial to achieve). Such a bound was known earlier only for a nonexplicit center. Finding explicit bad list decoding configurations is of significant interest-for example, the best known rate versus distance tradeoff, due to Xing, is based on a bad list decoding configuration for algebraic-geometric codes, which is unfortunately not explicitly known