Performance Improvement of Optical Satellite Communications by Interleaved IEEE 802.11 LDPC

Abstract

Optical wireless communication using a laser is a strong candidate for the next generation satellite communications due to its large bandwidth. However, the channel environment of satellite communications is very tough, suffering from fading by atmospheric turbulence. Therefore, a powerful channel coding such as low-density parity check (LDPC) code is required for error correction. In this paper, the performance of a LDPC code is evaluated in this harsh channel environment. At the same time, in order to improve the system performance further, an interleaving method in combination with a LDPC code is used to overcome the burst error problem, which frequently occurs in optical satellite communication systems (OSC). Simulation results show that 970 consecutive burst error bits can be recovered by using a large size LDPC code and the proposed type of interleaving.