Performance analysis of an alternative to trellis coded modulation for a waveform transmitted over a channel with pulse-noise interference

The performance of a communication system having almost the same spectral efficiency as a trellis coded modulation (TCM) system with r = 2/3 convolutional encoding and 8-ary phase-shift keying (8-PSK) modulation is investigated. TCM is a common solution to the problem of adding forward error correction (FEC) coding without an attendant increase in channel bandwidth. The primary drawback to TCM is that the achievable coding gain is limited by the maximum practical number of states in the convolutional encoder. The alternative system considered uses (63, 37) Reed-Solomon (RS) encoding. The six-bit symbols at the output of the Reed-Solomon encoder undergo serial-to-parallel conversion to two three-bit symbols, which are then independently transmitted on the in-phase and quadrature components of the carrier using 8-ary biorthogonal keying. This system has a null-to-null bandwidth of 0.993R_b, which is 0.7% smaller than TCM with r = 2/3 convolutional encoding and 8-PSK modulation. The two waveforms are compared for the relatively benign case where additive white Gaussian noise is the only noise present as well as when pulse-noise interference is present.