Stopping sets for MDS-based product codes

Stopping sets for MDS-based product codes under iterative row-column algebraic decoding are analyzed in this paper. A union bound to the performance of iterative decoding is established for the independent symbol erasure channel. This bound is tight at low and very low error rates. We also proved that the performance of iterative decoding reaches the performance of Maximum-Likelihood decoding at vanishing channel erasure probability. Numerical results are shown for product codes at different coding rates.