The performance of Reed-Solomon codes on a bursty-noise channel

The performance of a Reed-Solomon coded binary communication system on a bursty-noise channel is considered. Bursty noise is defined to be background Gaussian noise plus burst noise, where burst noise is defined to be a series of finite-duration Gaussian-noise pulses with fixed duration and Poisson occurrence times. Using the noise model, along with ideal symbol interleaving, decoded bit-error probability bounds are derived for the case where the noise bursts are long with respect to the channel symbol rate. Specific performance results are presented for the (31,15,8) Reed-Solomon Joint Tactical Distribution System (JTIDS) code with a binary phase shift keyed (BPSK) modulation scheme. Simulation results are presented and they compare well with the theoretical results.<>