Concatenated coding for frequency-hop spread-spectrum with partial-band interference

Concatenated coding techniques are applied to slow frequency-hop packet radio communications for channels with partial-band interference. Binary orthogonal signaling (e.g., binary FSK) is employed with noncoherent demodulation, Reed-Solomon codes are employed for the outer code while both block and convolutional codes are considered for the inner code. Hard-decision and soft decision decoding methods are considered for the inner codes. A method is devised for estimating the reliability of the outer Reed-Solomon code symbols, and this estimate is used to determine which code symbols should be erased. Comparisons are made between the performance of concatenated codes and the performance of Reed-Solomon codes alone.