On the Analysis of Reed-Solomon Codes for OFDM Systems over Rician Fading Channels

The relative strength between the direct and the scattered paths of the received signal in wireless communication as described by the Rician factor K specifies the quality of the transmission link. Fading in Rician channel models influence the performance of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) systems. Accordingly, channel estimation together with different Forward Error Correction (FEC) schemes are used to provide significant performance gain for OFDM systems over fading channels. In most literature, the performance of FEC schemes such as Turbo and LDPC codes have been analysed for OFDM systems over frequency-selective Rician fading channels. This paper evaluates the performance of Reed-Solomon (RS) codes over frequency-selective Rician fading channels. The performance of RS codes is firstly studied for different Rician K factors and Doppler frequencies. Secondly, the performance of RS codes is reviewed assuming different code rates (n^k) for both hard-decision and soft-decision decoding algorithms. The Euclidean algorithm (EA) is used as the RS hard-decision decoding algorithm while the Parity-check Transformation Algorithm (PTA) is deployed as the RS soft-decision decoding algorithm. The results for the various channel and coding conditions are documented through computer simulations. The simulation results validate the importance of a high Rician K factor. Interestingly, the simulation results verify that adopting a low-rate code do not necessarily improve the error rate irrespective of the Rician K factor. This analysis is relevant in order to establish the performance of combined RS codes with OFDM systems over frequency-selective Rician fading channels.