Concatenated coding performance for FSK modulation on time-correlated Rician fading channels

We present in this paper an analytical method for evaluating the performanc e of noninterleaved concatenated codes over channels modeled as a nonfreque ncy selective correlated Rician fading channel with a known power spectral density. The main idea is to model the communication system from the modula tor input to the demodulator output as a finite state channel (FSC) model, and apply powerful enumeration techniques to such a discrete channel in ord er to gain useful information on system performance. The concatenated schem e makes use of two codes; Reed-Solomon codes are employed for the outer cod e, and binary block codes are used as the inner code, Next, the method is e xtended to study the effect on the performance when an interleaving with fi nite depth is incorporated into the communication system. A comparison betw een symbol and bit interleaving is made. Finally, we study the potential ga in produced when channel information is passed on to the outer decoder in t he form of an erasure symbol. In all cases, analytical expressions for the probability of the number of error symbols produced by the FSC model mere o btained in terms of a coefficient in a formal power series, This is an inte resting alternative approach with respect to computer simulations.