Suboptimal Viterbi decoding metrics for channels with pulse jamming

The tradeoff between complexity and performance of decoding metrics for use with Viterbi decoding has been studied for a channel with Gaussian pulse jamming. It is shown that a metric with three-bit quantization provides a good combination of robust performance and low complexity. In addition, a new variable rate coding scheme which utilizes soft information from the quantizer is described. The performance of this scheme is compared with that of a scheme which attempts to count corrected errors. It is shown that an improvement in performance may be obtained without significant increase in complexity by using this new scheme.