Non-interleaved Reed-Solomon coding performance on finite state channels

The analysis of a communication system operating over finite state channel (FSC) models includes the calculation of the probability of subsets of error sequences. In this paper we first present an analytical method for evaluating the performance of non-interleaved Reed-Solomon (RS) codes over channels modeled as FSC models with an arbitrary number of states. The main idea is to express the probability of the number of error symbols produced by the channel in terms of a coefficient in a formal power series. Next, the method is extended to study the effect on the performance when an interleaving with finite depth is incorporated into the communication system. The general expressions are specialized for a Gilbert-Elliott channel (GEC) with known model parameters, and numerical results are derived.