Performance simulation and analysis of M-ary frequency-shift keying with Reed Solomon encoding, noncoherent demodulation, and hybrid soft decision-hard decision decoding

Hybrid hard decision-soft decision (HD SD) decoding is a novel decoding technique for Reed Solomon (RS) codes. HD SD decoding utilizes traditional hard decision RS decoding where the received block is either decoded correctly or a decoding failure exists. In the event of a decoding failure, channel reliability information is used to identify received code symbols with a low probability of being correctly received and to generate new code symbol estimates that are used in the traditional RS decoding algorithm. HD SD RS decoding was developed for use with bandwidth efficient modulation schemes such as M-ary phase-shift keying). Since many communication systems use orthogonal modulation schemes such as M-ary frequency-shift keying (MFSK) for more robust communication links, this paper presents the performance simulation and analysis of MFSK with RS encoding, hybrid HD SD decoding, and noncoherent demodulation. In addition to AWGN, the effects of pulse-noise interference (PNI) are considered. An interesting result is that hybrid HD SD decoding has better performance and error correction capability than either traditional HD decoding or other RS SD techniques that have been examined in the literature, especially when PNI is present.