Performance of multicarrier π/4 QDPSK radio local transmission with forward erasure correction over multipath channels

We investigate an erasure decoded π/4 QDPSK multicarrier modulation (ED-MCM) by employing a simple Hamming (block) code. We propose the criteria, i.e. relative minimum receive power test (RMRPT) and relative maximum decision error test (RMDET) for erasure generation and evaluate ED-MCM´s performance by applying these tests to the average received power, average decision error, and instantaneous symbol/bit decision errors. At a normalized delay spread of 1/64, computer simulation results indicate coding gains of 6.0-7.0 dB with ED-MCM at a BER of 10^-3. RMDET/RMRPT based erasure decoding yields a 1.5-2.5 dB improvement over the conventional forward error correction (FEC) decoding at a BER of 10^-5. Simulation results at other normalized delay spreads, i.e., 1/32, 1/16 are also obtained. The erasure criteria (RMRPT and RMDET) applied to the average values of received power/decision error yield consistently better performance over error only decoding