'Errors-and-erasures' decoding in RS coded DS-CDMA using noncoherent M-ary orthogonal modulation

In this contribution, we investigate the performance of Reed-Solomon (RS) coded DS-CDMA using noncoherent M-ary orthogonal modulation over multipath Rayleigh fading channels. 'Errors-and-erasures' RS decoding is considered, where erasures are declared based on various erasure insertion schemes, such as the maximum output threshold test (OTT), ratio threshold test (RTT) and the joint maximum output and ratio threshold test (MOR-TT). Furthermore, the performance of 'errors-and-erasures' decoding employing the joint MOR-TT is compared to that of 'error-correction-only' decoding and to that of 'errors-and-erasures' decoding using the OTT as well as the RTT. The numerical results show that, when using 'errors-and-erasures' decoding, RS codes of a given code rate can achieve a significantly higher coding gain than without erasure information, and that the MOR-TT technique outperforms both the RTT and the OTT techniques.