Tradeoffs in concatenated coding for frequency-hop packet radio with partial-band interference

Concatenated coding techniques are applied to a frequency-hop (FH) packet radio on a channel with partial-band interference. Binary orthogonal signaling (e.g., binary frequency shift keying) is used with noncoherent demodulation. The outer code is a Reed-Solomon code, and both block and convolutional codes are considered for the inner code. Hard-decision Viterbi decoding is used for the convolutional code. Methods are proposed for using the inner code to derive reliability information, which is used to identify and erase unreliable symbols. Comparisons are made between the performance of these concatenated coding schemes and the performance of Reed-Solomon codes alone