Performance enhancement of a dual-signal receiver system for simultaneous reception of two co-channel signals by applying error correction coding

The dual-signal receiver (DSR), proposed for simultaneous reception of two narrowband modulated co-channel signals, shows large performance degradation when both signals have about equal strength. The performance enhancement of the DSR using binary phase shift keying (BPSK) modulation is obtained with forward error correction (FEC) coding. Rather short linear block codes were evaluated using hard and soft decision decoding techniques. With soft decision decoding, large coding gains are obtained in the channel with co-channel interference and additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). The gain for the channel with interference is larger than for the AWGN-channel, but the absolute performance is worse. Hard decision decoding gives no significant enhancement. The coding gain for the small signal is about the same as for the large signal due to the occurrence of correlated errors