Comparison of Concatenated Reed-Solomon Coding with Hard-decision to Soft-decision LDPC Coding for the Rayleigh Fading Channel

Reed-Solomon (RS) codes C(n, k, n - k + 1) are commonly used error-control codes, because they are Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) codes. Over a Binary Erasure Channel, RS codes perform with optimal results and approach the maximum channel capacity. In this paper, we apply RS codes to packet wireless transmission over the uncorrelated flat Rayleigh fading channel. It is shown that by using an RS code concatenated with BCH codes and using hard decisions, better results are obtained than using bit interleaved LDPC codes, with soft-decision decoding. The BCH code is used to correct small numbers of errors due to noise and also to detect the presence of deep fades, in which case the entire packet is erased. Erased packets are corrected by the RS code. We also discuss the effect of overall code rate on the net performance.