Multilevel Codes for Satellite Broadcasting under LMS Channels

In this paper, we evaluate a multilevel coding (MLC) scheme with multi-stage decoding (MSD) designed for satellite broadcasting communications, where services with different quality of service (QoS) are desirable. A simple Land-Mobile-Satellite (LMS) channel model is presented, based on channel states and their transitions. The instantaneous channel capacity for suburban and forest scenarios is calculated using the mutual information concept. An established transmission scheme for satellite broadcasting, which uses bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) with Gray mapping, is compared with the MLC scheme in terms of channel capacity and outage probability. The effect of removing a long channel interleaver in the physical layer is analyzed, showing that the MLC scheme is a good alternative to BICM for satellite broadcasting.