A new DVB-RCS satellite channel model based on Discrete Time Markov Chain and Quality Degree

DVB-RCS is an open satellite communications standard allowing a bi-directional communication via satellite. These characteristics certainly promoted its enormous diffusion in the commercial area and the academic research interest. In this context, it is very important to test DVB-RCS systems using an efficient satellite channel model. In the literature many channel models have been carried out, but most of them work at the bit level or they investigate only some aspects of channel interaction. In this work we provide a high level satellite channel model based on Discrete Time Markov Chain (DTMC) modeling, useful in every simulation context. Our model, called Quality Degree-DTMC (QD-DTMC), is based on the concept of Quality Degree (QD) of a given observation windows: the idea is not to analyze a single packet, but fixing an observation window and evaluating the QD of the link, computing the Packet Error Rate (PER) associated to the specific window. The effectiveness of the proposed idea has been evaluated through a deep campaign of simulations.