Erasure insertion in frequency-hop communications with fading and partial-band interference

The use of block coding and errors-and-erasures decoding can enhance performance substantially in frequency-hop communication systems, provided that a good scheme is employed to determine which symbols to erase. In this paper, methods for determining erasures derived from Bayesian decision theory are applied to the mitigation of fading and partial-band interference. The performance of receivers using the Bayesian technique is compared with that of receivers that make erasure decisions using Viterbi's (1982) ratio-threshold test. The performance of hard-decision demodulation and the theoretical performance of receivers with access to perfect side information are also compared. It is found that the Bayesian receiver provides the best performance, and that error probabilities for the Bayesian receiver are lower than those for hard-decision demodulation by as much as six orders of magnitude.