Further studies on efficient AFEC schemes for Ka-band satellite systems

Adaptive fade margin is required to counter the severe but varying rain attenuation in Ka satellite communications. In searching for a suitable rain countermeasure, the effectiveness of the adaptive forward error control (AFEC) scheme is studied. Two AFEC schemes using convolutional codes and concatenated codes are proposed and their performance analyzed. The schemes can provide a progressively adaptive fade margin of 10.1 and 10.4 dB, respectively, in excess of the systems fixed fade margin. To improve the efficient use of shared resources of the system, an AFEC scheme using double coding is introduced, and its performance is analyzed. In this scheme a single codec is used repeatedly, and as a result the hardware cost is reduced and the utilization increased. The effective usable capacity of a conceptual AFEC resource sharing scheme using Golay double coding is also analyzed.<>