Research on Fountain Codes in Deep Space Communication

The features of long delay, great error rate and packet loss, asymmetric bandwidth between uplink and downlink and links easily interrupted in deep space communication determine the technology of encoding and decoding is a difficult issue. The basic conception and features of fountain codes are introduced, and the question of all-selected, degree distribution and the decoding algorithm of fountain codes and the performance of decoding algorithms of LDPC are analyzed. On the basis of these analyses, the concatenated codes of LDPC codes as inner codes and fountain codes as outer codes are proposed to use in deep space communication. The result of the concatenated codes having good performance and comparatively simple decoding complexity is obtained by analyzing its performance. The concatenated codes can satisfy the transmission requirements and have great potential applications in deep space communication.