A simulation environment for concatenated and turbo codes analysis and optimization

This paper is aimed at presenting the simulation environment, called SatComSE, that has been developed to study the influence of errors on concatenated and turbo coded transmissions (Berrou et al., 1993; Barbalescu, 1998; Andersen, 1995; Valenti, 1999) in order to optimize the characteristics of the code according to the noise conditions. In principle in order to perform the optimization of a generic communication system, an analytical description of the problem should be found, an objective fund ion that represents an explicit relationship between input parameters and performances should be defined, and this objective function should be optimized with one of operational research techniques. In practice this approach can be applied only to idealized and oversimplified cases due to the difficulty to find both the analytical description and the objective function in complex communication systems. For this reason, as also suggested by the European Space Agency, the evaluation of the reliability of generic communication systems definitively needs to be performed through the simulation of the communication system itself.