Performance Analysis of MQAM with Errors-and-Erasures Decoding to Mitigate the Effects of Pulse-Noise Interference

The performance of a system utilizing an M-ary quadrature-amplitude modulation waveform transmitted over a frequency-selective, slowly fading, Nakagami channel with pulse-niose interference in addition to additive white Gaussian noise is examined. The underlying information bits are assumed to be convolutionally encoded with a binary convolutional code prior to transmission over the channel, and the receiver is assumed to use errors-and-erasures demodulation and Viterbi decoding. The performance obtained with errors-and-erasures demodulation and decoding is compared with the performance obtained with errors-only hard decision Viterbi decoding.