Unified performance analysis of Reed-Solomon coded M-ary FSK modulation in AWGN, Rician and Rayleigh fading channels

M-ary FSK is a power efficient modulation method that is currently being proposed and studied for low power and low data rate applications. The power efficiency of this modulation method increases as the signal set increases at the expense of increased complexity. This contribution presents a unified analysis of its uncoded and coded performance in AWGN, Rician and Rayleigh fading channels using optimum non-coherent demodulation with Reed-Solomon codes. Previous difficulties encountered in the literature to determine the performance of large signal sets are circumvented by the analysis presented. Optimum codes as a function of the code's error correction capability and channel model are determined for a commonly specified performance measure. The results of this paper should be useful as benchmarks of obtainable performance and as a reference for validating the results of simulation studies when slow fading models are applicable.