Soft decision Reed-Solomon coding for MPSK slow frequency hop spread spectrum multiple access communications

A slow frequency hop spread spectrum communication system with multiple access interference is analyzed using MPSK (M=2, 4, and 8) along with Reed-Solomon coding over an additive white Gaussian noise channel. Errors and erasures Reed-Solomon decoding is performed by using an appended parity bit and reliability side information. For BPSK and QPSK two bit soft decisions are used to determine symbol reliability. For small multiple access interference and errors only decoding, QPSK and 8PSK are shown to have low error floors, while for high multiple access interference and both errors only and errors and erasures decoding, 8PSK has the lowest error floor.