CCSDS Rate-Compatible Product Code for Ka-Band Satellite Communications

Abstract

The efficiency of Ka-band Satellite communication is very susceptible to several weather conditions. Error patterns of the Ka-band satellite channels under various weather conditions (clear/cloudy, rain and thundershower) indicate that errors neither happen separately at random nor in well-defined bursts, but a mixed manner. Therefore, designing codes that can correct random and burst errors simultaneously are highly desired. In this work, we introduce a configuration of a CCSDS rate compatible product code that includes both the CCSDS-recommended Reed-Solomon codes and the extended Hamming code. The proposed scheme not only achieves almost the same error performance of the CCSDS-recommended Reed-Solomon Convolutional concatenated codes but also has minimal decoding effort and memory requirement. Moreover, an analysis of the different weather conditions in the Ka-band for satellite communication will be introduced.