The University of British Columbia

Characteristics of mobile communication channels can be summarized by three important factors: path losses larger than free space, fading typically taken as Rayleigh, and shadowing generally assumed as lognormal. As a result of frequency reuse, cochannel interference is also a major concern. Here, these factors are studied and the required carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR) and carrier-to-interference ratio (CIR) to combat them are investigated. It is shown that forward error coding schemes along with the diversity techniques can be used to improve the system performance. Code selection criteria for mobile channels are considered and an efficient universal Reed-Solomon decoder is presented