Fault tolerance in VSAT front-end signal processing subsystems

Very small aperture terminal satellite communications systems rely on sophisticated space-borne signal processing resources, particularly efficient block processing configurations. Fault tolerance in these processing operations is an important requirement. New techniques for fault-tolerant signal processing designs at the data flow level are presented. The front-end processing needed for demultiplexing, demodulation and error-correcting decoding is addressed, using algorithm based fault tolerance methods. Block processing demultiplexers are protected by introducing internal low-rate parity calculations based on real number codes. On the other hand, the channels´ error-correcting codes provide threads of redundancy through the demodulators and decoders which are employed in checking their computational integrity