A Bayesian Method for Dependent Erasures in Frequency-Hop Communication Systems with Rayleigh Fading

The use of block coding and errors-and-erasures decoding can enhance performance in frequency-hop communication systems, provided that a good scheme is employed to determine which symbol to erase. The problem of making erasure decisions from collections of receiver outputs is investigated in this paper. Methods to determine which received symbols to erase are derived from Bayesian decision theory. The result is a Bayesian scheme in which erasure decisions are made collectively for each codeword. The performance of this scheme is compared with the performance of another Bayesian method in which erasure decisions are made independently from symbol to symbol, and both are compared to the performance of receivers that do not erase. The Bayesian method with dependent erasures is found to provide the best performance.