A comparison of two methods for erasure generation in frequency-hop communications with partial-band interference and Rayleigh fading

The erasure of unreliable symbols prior to decoding can significantly improve the performance of frequency-hop communications with Reed-Solomon decoding. Two methods are considered in this paper for obtaining side information which can be used to declare erasures. One method declares erasures based on the number of errors made in demodulating a known sequence of test symbols. The second method, which is a special form of concatenated coding, attaches a parity check symbol to subsets of code symbols and declares erasures when errors are detected by the parity check code. The performance of each of these methods is evaluated for frequency-hop communications over channel with Rayleigh fading, partial-band interference, and thermal noise