Reducing the probability of sync-word false acquisition with Reed-Solomon codes

In our previous work we introduced a method for avoiding/excluding some symbols in Reed-Solomon (RS) codes, called symbol avoidance. In this paper, we apply the symbol avoidance method in sync-word based synchronization of RS encoded data. With the symbol avoidance method we reduce the probability of the RS encoded data being mistaken for the sync-word used to delimit the start/end of the data. The symbols in the RS code are avoided according to the sync-word used, such that the sync-word has very low probability of being found in the RS codewords, where it was not inserted. Therefore, for different sync-words, different symbols need to be avoided in the RS code. The goal here is to reduce the probability of false acquisition of the sync-word in the RS encoded framed data.