Performance of ATM cell transmission via regenerative satellite links

The ATM performance over fiber-optic terrestrial networks is known to achieve high quality-of service (QoS) classes supporting different traffic types, and very low probability of bit errors, A probability of cell-loss on the order of 10^-10 and a bit-error-rate (BER) on the order of 10^-8 for data services are made possible on fiber-optic links. In contrast to the fiber-optic case, satellite transmission is often subjected to a large number of channel errors due to atmospheric noise and channel interference. Therefore, in order to achieve a fiber-optic like performance on the satellite channel, forward-error-correction (FEC) codes are essential for both the header and data fields of the ATM cell. This paper discusses two different FEC coding schemes for the ATM cell header. In addition, a FEC code design for data services (corresponding to AAL5) is presented. In the analysis we assume that there are no significant burst errors problem on the SATCOM link, and errors due to channel transmissions are mostly random errors