Successive-erasure decoding of RS-coded MPSK schemes in a Rayleigh fading channel

A soft-decision decoding algorithm, termed successive-erasure decoding (SED), is presented for decoding of RS-coded MPSK schemes. This decoding procedure, originally introduced by G.D. Forney (see Concatenated Codes, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 1963) in connection with generalised minimum-distance decoding, uses channel measurement information in an algebraic decoding algorithm. The performance evaluation of some examples of RS-coded MPSK schemes shows that the use of such information bridges the gap in performance between the hard-decision decoding and maximum likelihood decoding (MLD). For example, for RS