On the design and selection of convolutional codes for an uninterleaved, bursty Rician channel

This article focuses on code design and code selection rules under power and decoding delay constraints for an antipodal (BPSK) modulated and convolutionally encoded communication system. The system operates over a slowly fading AWGN channel, described by the block-fading model. We emphasize perfect coherent detection with maximum likelihood decoding assuming ideal channel information (the instantaneous fading values). The dominant design criterion in this scenario is the code diversity level in terms of blocks while the standard Hamming distance plays a secondary role. A code design procedure, based on maximum distance separable (MDS) cyclic block codes is presented along with a code-search algorithm. The performance results of selected codes are assessed via simulation and compared to those achieved by Reed-Solomon codes with erasure and error decoding.