Analysis of concatenated Reed-Solomon encoding schemes with full and partial interleaving for short data messages

A concatenation of Reed-Solomon and repetition codes with symbol interleaving is considered for applications in which the message length is limited and the probability of incorrect received symbols is high. An analysis is developed with reference to a Packet Radio Network, using Spread Spectrum modulation, simultaneously affected by random errors and burst errors. The results obtained are compared with those derived by numerical simulation. It is shown that a canonical formulation can be used for the case of full interleavers, but it cannot be applied to encoding schemes with partial interleavers. In the latter situation a modified, improved, approach is proposed.