PPM Performance for Reed-Solomon Decoding Over an Optical-RF Relay Link

Consideration is presently being given to an optical-RF relay deep space communication link that transmits optical PPM data from spacecraft to orbital relay, then retransmits the data via microwave to ground. It is generally advantageous to use Reed-Solomon (RS) encoding over the PPM optical link for improved error correction. In this paper several demodulating schemes are considered for generating the RS symbols at the relay photodetector output, and the effect of each on overall RS decoding performance is computed. Both Poisson and Gaussian optical noise models are used in the evaluation. The effect on performance of bit errors in the relay downlink is also examined.