Utilisation of multipath phenomenon to improve the performance of BCH and RS codes

In wireless communication, there exists a phenomenon know as ‘multipath’. This phenomenon is considered as a disadvantage because it causes interference. The multipath phenomenon results in an antenna receiving two or more signals from the same sent signal from different paths. This paper considers them as redundant copies of the transmitted data and utilises them to improve the performance of forward error correction (FEC) codes without extra redundancy, in order to improve data transmission reliability and increase the bit rate over wireless communication channels. The system was evaluated in bit error rate (BER) and used Bose, Ray-Chaudhuri and Hocquenghem (BCH) and Reed-Solomon (RS) codes as FEC. The results showed that the utilisation of the multipath improves the performance of FEC. Furthermore, the performance of FEC codes had t1 error correction capability and employed the multipath is better than FEC codes have t2 error correction capability and without the multipath, where t1 < t2. Consequently, the bit rate is increased, and communication reliability is improved without extra redundancy.