Viterbi Decoder Performance in Gaussian Noise and Periodic Erasure Bursts

In this paper, we evaluate the performance of noninterleaved convolutional codes in the presence of Gaussian noise and periodic erasure bursts, with maximum likelihood (Viterbi) decoding. The results show that even for burst lengths that are a significant fraction of the code constraint length, the performance degradation is surprisingly small. It is then shown that in many of these cases the use of interleaving would provide very little performance gain. In addition, for burst lengths that are so long that interleaving is unavoidable, these results demonstrate the robustness of fixed periodic interleavers against variability in the parameters of the burst process.