Novel Scheme of Orthogonal Convolutional Coding and Non-Iterative Decoding for Mobile Satellite Communication Systems

Iterative decoding of orthogonal convolutional code is widely used for its excellent performance. However, the iterations lead to high complexity and long decoding delay, which is unsuitable for low- rate voice service in mobile satellite communications with on-board processing. In this paper, a novel scheme of orthogonal convolutional coding as well as an associated non-iterative joint decoding algorithm based on factor graph are proposed. Due to its non-iterative nature, this novel scheme has low decoding complexity and short latency, which indicates its potential on-board use in the low-rate satellite voice service, or other kinds of services with a high bit error rate (BER) tolerance and a tight delay requirement. Simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed novel coding scheme and non-iterative decoding algorithm in both AWGN and Rician channels.