The performance of rate-compatible punctured convolutional codes for digital mobile radio

The unequal error protection capabilities of convolutional codes belonging to the family of rate-compatible punctured convolutional codes (RCPC codes) are studied. The performance of these codes is analyzed and simulated for the first fading Rice and Rayleigh channels with differentially coherent four-phase modulation (4-DPSK). To mitigate the effect of fading, interleavers are designed for these unequal error protection codes, with the interleaving performed over one or two blocks of 256 channel bits. These codes are decoded by means of the Viterbi algorithm using both soft symbol decisions and channel state information. For reference, the performance of these codes on a Gaussian channel with coherent binary phase-shift keying (2-CPSK) is presented. A number of examples are provided to show that it is possible to accommodate widely different error protection levels within short information blocks. Unequal error protection codes for a subband speech coder are studied in detail. A detailed study of the effect of the code and channel parameters such as the encoder memory, the code rate, interleaver depth, fading bandwidth, and the contrasting performance of hard and soft decisions on the received symbols is provided