Coding methods for portable radios

The authors investigate the word error performance of FEC (forward error correction) codes in a frequency nonselective portable radio channel with different binary modulation schemes. The effect of code interleaving and channel measurement information on word-error probability is analyzed. To account for the correlated errors in the transmitted bit sequence, the channel state is modelled using the discrete Gilbert-Elliot model. The word-error probability plots provide useful insight into the significance of interleaving degree and channel-state information (CSI) for the code performance in a portable radio. It was demonstrated that at low signal/noise ratios, as is typical of the Rayleigh fading channel, the use of CSI at the decoder with both coherent and partially coherent schemes offers finite coding gain