Packet-level iterative errors-and-erasures decoding for SFH spread-spectrum communications with Reed-Solomon codes and differential encoding

A packet-level iterative detection technique that employs errors-and-erasures decoding has been described previously for SFH communications using Reed-Solomon coding. The technique enhances the performance of the SFH system in intersymbol-interference channels with only a minimal increase in complexity over one-shot errors-and-erasures decoding. In this paper the performance of iterative EE decoding is considered for a SFH system with differentially encoded transmissions. It is shown that the use of differential encoding improves the performance of packet-level iterative detection in an AWGN channel with only a modest increase in detection complexity, and it also improves the performance in an intersymbol-interference channel in many instances. The packet size, the target probability of error and the channel impulse response are considered, and the effect of each on the performance gain and the complexity is examined.