Support MUOS All IP Services with the FEC Enhancement

The MUOS (mobile user objective system) relies on 3GPP technology to support the mobile users, which is similar to satellite-UMTS. It involves transmission of the same encoded data over channels that may vary significantly. In order to achieve all IP services in the MUOS ground stations, one of the most important IP quality of service (QoS) parameters, bit-error-rate (BER), required to support IP traffic in the other DoD wideband/narrowband satellite communication systems can be as low as 10^-8. The channel code specified in 3GPP is an 8-state PCCC (parallel concatenated constituent code) which suffers BER "flooring" as early as 10^-6. It is hard to achieve BER of 10 ^-8 without a significantly large channel SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) margin. This unnecessarily large margin may impose a problem in closing the user-to-base (U2B) and base-to-user (B2U) link budget limit and the availability. This paper presents an enhanced approach to overcome this shortfall in supporting all IP services within the MUOS and to the other DoD SATCOM systems