Concatenated coding and interleaving for half-rate GSM digital mobile radio system

A concatenated Fire and convolutional coding scheme with burst error-trapping and eight-level soft-decision Viterbi decoding for the half-rate GSM digital mobile radio system, operating at a gross coded speed of 11.4 kbit/s is proposed. The concatenated coding scheme was designed in conjunction with a 6.7 kbit/s speech coder which offers good speech quality and robustness against noise disturbance. The simulated bit error probability performance of the scheme is presented, and is compared with that of the full-rate GSM system.