Coding Schemes Incorporating Soft-Decision DPSK over HF Rayleigh Fading Channels

A soft-decision 8-DPSK modulation format is introducedin a concatenated coding scheme and the performance of the resultingsystem is evaluated over a slow Rayleigh fading HF ionospheric link inthe presence of Additive White Gaussian noise (AWGN). Well-known UngerboeckTCM techniques are used as inner codes and a Reed–Solomon blockcode as outer code. The coded/modulated signal is differentially encodedbefore transmission to combat random phase changes caused by the channel.Soft-decision demodulator's output is used as an input to a modifiedViterbi decoder that calculates the Euclidean distances of the receivedsignal from an 8-PSK constellation adapted to the signal's amplitudevariations. Block interleaving techniques are necessary to randomise longbursts of errors caused by the fading channel. Simulation results showthat significant coding gains are achieved with a minor bandwidth expansionover uncoded, diversity or other coded systems. Finally, theinteresting effects of interleaving on the performance of the proposedsystems are analysed.