Performance of channel interleaved turbo coded system for high rate mobile satellite communications

This paper investigates the performance of channel interleaving in a turbo coded system over the aeronautical-satellite channel. The turbo coded system, channel model and various performance issues are discussed in detail. It is shown that the effects of frequency selective fading and the inter-symbol-interference in the aeronautical channel can degrade the system performance significantly. It is shown that channel interleaving is essential to achieve an acceptable packet error rate performance over an aeronautical channel for high rate mobile satellite communications. The potential benefits of equalisation are also discussed and some results presented which indicate that equalisation is not necessarily required at low operating points over such channels