Performance comparison of convolution and Reed–Solomon codes in underwater multipath fading channel.

In underwater acoustic communication, the transmitted signal is affected by multipath fading and background noise. Therefore, the intersymbol interference (ISI) of underwater acoustic communication systems depends on the effects of these parameters. To cope with ISI due to multipath fading, various equalizers and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing systems have been developed. Forward error correction coding is also adopted to reduce the error by background noise. Here, the performances of convolution code (CC) and Reed–Solomon (RS) code are evaluated in a multipath fading channel. The CC shows better performance in frequency nonselective fading but the RS code shows better performance in frequency selective fading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]