Design of reed-solomon and convolutional coded OFDM system and performance analysis

In this study, OFDM and error-correcting codes, which have an important place in digital communication systems, have been studied. Literature research has been made on OFDM and error-correcting codes like Reed-Solomon and convolutional codes. Reed-Solomon and convolutional coded OFDM system has been designed. Furthermore, system's performance analysis has been made. OFDM is a special case of multicarrier transmission. The basic principle of OFDM is to split a high-rate datastream into a number of lower rate streams that are transmitted similtuanesly over a number of subcarriers. One of the main reasons to use OFDM is to increase the robustness against frequency selective fading or narrowband interference. In a single carrier system, a single fade or interferer can cause the entire link to fail, but in a multicarrier system, only a small percentage of the subcarriers will be affected.Error correcting codes can then be used to correct the errors. In error correcting, combining convolutional and block codes in a concatenated code is particularly powerful technique. In this study Reed-Solomon codes are used as an outer code and convolutional codes are used as an inner code.