An integrated FEC coding scheme for ATM transmission over regenerative satellite networks

Abstract

The application of asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) on both wireless and satellite networks requires system adaptation. This adaptation has to improve the overall system's performance, and achieve high quality-of-service classes approaching that for fibre-optic communications. In this paper, a new integrated forward-error-correction (FEC) coding scheme is introduced for ATM transmission over regenerative satellite networks. The proposed FEC scheme is a concatenation of two Reed–Solomon codes tailored for the header and payload parts of the ATM cell. This integrated coding scheme is shown to significantly improve the cell loss ratio as compared to the standard CRC code used in the ATM cell header. We obtain both upper and lower performance bounds for the concatenated code and check their accuracy when compared to exact system's performance. Both analytical and simulation results show that a cell loss ratio and bit-error rate (BER) of 10−25 and 10−7 can be, respectively, achieved with minimum delay requirements on the SATCOM link. Finally, an approximation for the system's throughout is obtained. It is shown that using a hybrid selective-repeat automatic-repeat-request (SR-ARQ) with the RS code, a large throughput of approximately 0.843 can be achieved at BERs lower than 10−7 for data services. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.