Successive-erasure decoding of RS-coded MPSK schemes in a Rayleigh fading channel

A soft-decision decoding algorithm, successive-erasure decoding (SED), is presented for decoding of Reed-Solomon- (RS-) coded M-ary phase-shift-keying (MPSK) schemes. This decoding procedure, originally introduced by G.D. Forney (1963) in connection with generalized minimum-distance (GMD) decoding, utilizes channel measurement information, (CMI) in its algebraic decoding algorithm, The performance evaluation of some RS-coded MPSK schemes shows that the use of such information bridges the gap in performance between hard-decision decoding (HDD) and maximum-likelihood decoding (MLD). For example, for RS (7, 5)-coded, 8PSK, SED provides 3.5-6-dB coding gain, at P _b=10^-5, compared to errors-and-erasures and errors-only decodings, respectively. This coding gain is only 1.4 dB less than the gain achievable by MLD. The performance of the SED algorithm is improved by an additional 0.7 dB when the channel state information (CSI) is used