Performance Evaluation of Selected Serial Concatenation Codes in AWGN & Frequency Selective Rayleigh Fading Channels

Abstract

Concatenation codes have attracted a great deal of interest since their discovery. They have been successfully used in digital communication systems in order to achieve reliable transmission on a noisy channel. In this paper, three models of concatenation codes are designed and tested over AWGN and frequency selective Rayleigh Fading (FSRF) channels. The first model uses convolution codes as outer and inner codes. The second model uses convolution code as the outer code and Reed-Solomon code as the inner one. While in the third model, the Reed-Solomon code is used as the outer code and the convolution code as the inner one. The performance comparisons among these models show that the last model gives better performance in both of the transmission channels considered and for different types of modulation. It attains a maximum gain of (3dB) in SNR over other models in AWGN channel while attains (8 dB) gain for FSRF channel case when bit error rate (BER) equals to 8*10^-3.