Experimental Mesurements of Viterbi Decoding in Burst Channels

Experimental measurements of the performance of Viterbi-algorithm decoders in the presence of burst-interference are presented. Results are shown for different code rates and different interference-burst duty factors, amplitudes, and burst lengths. Considerable stress is placed on interference-mitigation techniques (such as symbol erasure, blanking, limiting, and quantizer backoff) that can be added at the receiver prior to the decoder. There is generally good agreement between the measured results and several methods for calculating approximate performance.