Soft decision decoding for bandwidth efficient RS coded MPSK schemes over a Rayleigh fading channel

The authors consider the performance of the bandwidth-efficient RS (Reed-Solomon) coded MPSK schemes using soft-decision decoding over a Rayleigh fading channel. For the short codes it is practical to perform soft-decision decoding by introducing a trellis structure and using the Viterbi algorithm. The authors carried out upper bound analysis and computer simulation for Viterbi decoding of two short RS-coded 8PSK (phase shift keying) schemes, namely, RS