Performance of combined error correction and error detection for very short block length codes

A combination of error correction and error detection for channel coding under additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) is proposed, where the error detection is based on the statistics of a metric, that is defined as a function of the received and the decoded data stream, hence, no additional redundancy is required. This approach is especially useful for applications, where short block lengths are applied, for which the channel decoding normally does not perform very well for a reasonable amount of redundancy. Simulations show that the frame error rate (FER) can be reduced significantly at the cost of a higher retransmission request rate (RRR), where both FER and RRR are subject to optimization depending on the specific application.