Performance of a JTIDS-type waveform with errors-and-erasures decoding in pulsed-noise interference

The Joint Tactical Information Distribution System (JTIDS) is the Link-16 communication terminal. JTIDS is a hybrid direct sequence/frequency-hopping spread spectrum system and features Reed-Solomon (RS) codes for channel coding. In this paper, the performance with an errors-and-erasures decoder (EED) in the JTIDS receiver is evaluated by a combination of analysis and simulation assuming perfect frequency dehopping, chip sequence synchronization, chip synchronization, and chip descrambling. Furthermore, maximum-likelihood chip detection is assumed rather than maximum-likelihood chip-sequence detection since the former represents a more practical assumption for a JTIDS-type signal. The probability of symbol error of a JTIDS-type waveform is evaluated for both the single- and the double-pulse structure in both additive white Gaussian noise and pulsed-noise interference. The results obtained with EED are compared to those obtained with errors-only RS decoding. In all cases considered, EED outperforms errors-only RS decoding in terms of probability of symbol error.