A joint approach to erasure marking and Viterbi decoding for impulsive noise channels

In many real-world communication systems, the extent of nonGaussian impulsive noise (IN) rather than Gaussian noise, poses practical limits on the achievable system performance. The decoding of IN-corrupted signals is complicated by the fact that accurate IN statistics are typically unavailable at the receiver. The conventional method is to mark the IN corrupted symbol as erasures before an error-and-erasure decoding is applied. In this work, we investigate a joint erasure marking Viterbi algorithm (JEVA), which allows significant error rate performance improvement over the separate erasure marking and decoding approach to be obtained at the expense of a higher complexity.