Improving BER Performance of T-DMB System by Error/Erasure Correction in RS Codes

In this paper, we introduce a new scheme to improve the performance of the terrestrial-digital multimedia broadcasting (T-DMB) system, which exploits the properties of the Reed-Solomon (RS) decoder to correct more errors by predicting as many erasures as possible in each RS packet in advance before decoding in the RS decoder. The concept depth of prediction (DoP) used for predicting erasures is introduced and derived. Simulation results show that with optimal DoP values, the new scheme yields performance gain of around 1dB at BER of 10^-8 resulting in the extended coverage area of the T-DMB system.