A METHOD FOR HIGH SPEED MODULATION AND ERROR CONTROL CODING

摘要

A digital data communication system is provided for transmitting a high speed differentially encoded data signal between a transmitter and a receiver. On the transmitter side (44), a high speed input data stream (42) is separated into a plurality of lower rate data streams by a demultiplexer (46). Prior to being multiplexed together to form a single high speed data stream, each of the lower rate data streams are individually block encoded by a group of Reed-Solomon block encoders (48) and then differentially encoded by a group of differential encoders (50). Alternatively, the plurality of low rate data streams are block encoded and then multiplexed together prior to being differentially encoded, so long as the multiplexing is performed on a code symbol-by-code symbol basis. Since the performance of a non-binary-based block code is based on an input code symbol error rate (as opposed to an input bit error rate), performance loss associated with either of the differential encoding schemes of the present invention are comparable to a non-differential encoding scheme.