PERFORMANCE COMPARISON OF DIFFERENT DECODING STRATEGIES FOR A BANDWIDTH-EFFICIENT BLOCK-CODED SCHEME ON MOBILE RADIO CHANNELS

Earlier analysis has shown that the bandwidth-efficient RS coded MPSK schemes provide substantial coding gains compared to the uncoded ones, on a Rayleigh fading channel. In this paper the performance of these schemes is evaluated on a shadowed Rician fading channel using different decoding strategies, namely, errors-only, errors-and-erasures, and soft-decision decoding. The lower bounds of the bit error probability are found for errors-only and for errors-and-erasures decoding. For the soft-decision decoding the upper bound of the bit error rate is derived. The error bounds are calculated and examined by simulation for some RS coded MPSK schemes on a shadowed Rician channel. It is shown that the performance of these schemes is significantly improved compared to uncoded QPSK. This improvement depends on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), decoding strategy, and the degree of shadowing. A comparison between different decoding techniques, for one of the RS coded schemes, for different degrees of shadowing shows that the use of channel measurement information in decoding process is more effective for heavy shadowed channels.