Reed-Solomon codes and their performance for FCMA systems in fading satellite channel

Fading in mobile satellite communications severely degrades the performance of data transmission. The emphasis in this paper is on the performance of uncoded and coded FCMA (frequency comb multiple access) in the fading environment. The channel is modeled with nonfrequency selective Rician and Rayleigh fading using noncoherent demodulation with Reed-Solomon (RS) codes and hard decision decoding. Berlekamp-Massey decoding of RS codes is used to compensate for the fading. The bit error rate (BER) after decoding is calculated for specific codes and for different values of Rician channel parameters. The results of this paper are obtained by simulation techniques. They show that substantial coding gains are obtained compared to the uncoded reference system. They are also useful as reference for validating the results of simulation studies