Erased-Chase decoding for RS-coded MPSK signaling over a Rayleigh fading channel

In this paper,a novel dual-metric,the maximum and minimum Squared Euclidean Distance Increment (SEDI) brought by changing the hard decision symbol,is introduced to measure the reli-ability of the received M-ary Phase Shift Keying (MPSK) symbols over a Rayleigh fading channel. Based on the dual-metric,a Chase-type soft decoding algorithm,which is called erased-Chase algorithm,is developed for Reed-Solomon (RS) coded MPSK schemes. The proposed algorithm treats the unre-liable symbols with small maximum SEDI as erasures,and tests the non-erased unreliable symbols with small minimum SEDI as the Chase-2 algorithm does. By introducing optimality test into the decoding procedure,much more reduction in the decoding complexity can be achieved. Simulation results of the RS(63,42,22)-coded 8-PSK scheme over a Rayleigh fading channel show that the proposed algorithm provides a very efficient tradeoff between the decoding complexity and the error performance. Finally,an adaptive scheme for the number of erasures is introduced into the decoding algorithm.