Adaptive forward error correction coding for diversity communication systems

Time-varying behavior of fading channels can cause severe degradations of the system's performance. Coding and Diversity are found to be efficient techniques to improve the performance of faded systems. Typically, diversity channels are used to provide the receiver replicas of transmitted signal. In this thesis, we will utilize the available diversity channels by incorporating forward error correction coding in an adaptive way in order to minimize the bit error rate of the system. Minimization of the overall error probability will be considered to determine the optimum code rate to be used over each channel based on its quality, subject to the constraint of fixed overall throughput rate.; Both BCH and RS coding with hard-decision decoding will be considered for the purpose of forward error correction. The performance of this system over Rayleigh and Nakagami-m fading channel models will be studied by means of computer simulation, and by numerical calculations whenever possible. The effect of channel correlation and the impact of outdated channel state information on the performance of the system will be also investigated.