High-level modulation with Reed-Solomon codes and slow frequency hopping for land mobile communications

Various soft-decision-decoding methods based on "error and erasure" decoding schemes of Reed-Solomon are investigated for a frequency hopped (FH) system. A modified Welch-Berlekamp decoding algorithm is used in order to reduce the complexity required by the decoder. Rayleigh channel fading parameters were estimated using linear interpolation. The BER performance of the system in the presence of AWGN, co-channel interference and slow Rayleigh fading are evaluated by computer simulation. Space diversity is applied to enhance the system performance. It is shown that "error and erasure" decoding can achieve more than 3dB gain over "error only" decoding at bit-error-probability of 10/sup -5/.