A better channel coding for a Link‐16 waveform in pulsed‐noise interference

Abstract

SUMMARYLink‐16 is a tactical data link currently used by North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries, the United States and its allies. The Link‐16 waveform features Reed–Solomon codes for channel coding, cyclic code‐shift keying for 32‐ary baseband symbol modulation, minimum‐shift keying for waveform modulation, and frequency hopping for transmission security. In addition to the original errors‐only decoding of Reed–Solomon codes, both an errors‐and‐erasures decoding (EED) and a special concatenated coding are proposed in this paper to determine a better channel coding scheme for a Link‐16 waveform with noncoherent detection in the presence of pulsed‐noise interference (PNI). The investigation is first carried out both analytically and by simulation for the original Link‐16 waveform transmitted over AWGN. It is then accomplished analytically for the proposed waveforms in both AWGN and PNI. The results show that EED achieves the best error rate performance for a Link‐16 waveform in both AWGN and PNI when the signal‐to‐noise ratio is relatively small. When both the signal‐to‐noise ratio is sufficiently large and the fraction active time of PNI is small, the proposed concatenated coding outperforms both EED and errors‐only decoding. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.