We consider the transmission of a Reed-Solomon (RS) code over a binary modulated time-correlated flat Rician fading channel with hard-decision demodulation. We define a binary packet (symbol) error sequence that indicates whether an RS symbol is successfully transmitted across the discrete (fading) channel whose input enters the modulator and whose output exits the demodulator. We then approximate the packet error sequence of the discrete channel (DC) using the recently developed queue-based channel (QBC), which is a simple finite-state Markov channel model with M th-order Markovian additive noise. In other words, we use the QBC to model the binary DC at the packet level. We propose a general framework for determining the probability of codeword error (PCE) for QBC models. We evaluate the modeling accuracy by comparing the simulated PCE for the DC with the numerically evaluated PCE for the QBC. Modeling results identify accurate low-order QBC models for a wide range of fading conditions and reveal that modeling the DC at the packet level is an efficient tool for nonbinary coding performance evaluation over binary channels with memory. Index Terms-Burst-noise channels, finite-state Markov channels (FSMCs), packet-error sequence, probability of codeword error (PCE), queue-based channel (QBC), Reed-Solomon (RS) codes, Rician fading.
I. INTRODUCTIONT HE DEVELOPMENT of binary additive (first-order) Markov noise channel (BAMNC) models to represent the successes and failures of the transmission of information packets over correlated flat-fading channels was considered in [1]-[4]. In these works, the packet-error (i.e., noise) process is constructed by taking into consideration the packet length, the parameters of the fading channel, the modulation/demodulation/diversity techniques, and the coding/ decoding schemes (if coded transmission is considered).