BAYESIAN METHODS FOR ERASURE INSERTION IN FREQUENCY-HOP COMMUNICATION-SYSTEMS WITH PARTIAL-BAND INTERFERENCE

The erasure of unreliable symbols improves the performance of most types of error-control coding if a good method is used to decide which symbols should be erased. Bayesian decision theory is employed to obtain such a method for use in frequency-hop communications with Reed-Solomon coding and errors-and-erasures decoding. The performance of frequency-hop communications with Bayesian erasure insertion is analyzed for channels with both partial-band and wideband Gaussian noise. The Bayesian technique is compared with Viterbi's ratio-threshold test, and these are compared to receivers that do not erase and use errors-only decoding. Comparisons are also made with receivers that erase all of the symbols that are affected by the partial-band interference. When interference is strong, large coding gains result from the Bayesian method, and error probabilities are reduced by several orders of magnitude.