Performance of coded systems over fading dispersive channels

The authors consider a number of topics concerned with coding schemes over fading dispersive channels. They begin with comparing the performance of the energy receiver with the optimum and envelope receivers. Different coding schemes are used to improve the performance. The effect of channel spread on the performance of single-state Reed-Solomon (RS) codes is investigated. Channel information (CI) is discussed as a means for further improvement. The simple erasure criterion used is suboptimal, but gives a measure of the gain that can be achieved by using CI. Of special interest is the use of a concatenated coding technique for forming codes of large distance. Concatenated codes using short RS codes with CI as inner codes and RS outer codes are compared. It has been shown that the improvement obtained by concatenation is significant for overspread channels. This is attributed to the implicit diversity introduced by the channel. Furthermore, a concatenated system using convolutional codes as inner codes performs better than the system using RS inner codes