CONCATENATED CODING ALTERNATIVES FOR FREQUENCY-HOP PACKET RADIO

Concatenated coding techniques are applied to slow frequency-hop packet radio communications for channels with partial-band interference. Binary orthogonal signaling (e.g., binary FSK) is employed with noncoherent demodulation. The outer codes are Reed-Solomon codes and the inner codes are convolutional codes. Two concatenated coding schemes are compared. The first employs an interleaver between the outer Reed-Solomon code and the inner convolutional code. The second scheme employs an additional interleaver following the convolutional code. Comparisons are made between the performance of these concatenated coding schemes and the performance of Reed-Solomon codes alone.