A LDPC Coding Scheme for Improving the Satellite ATM Links Performance

Satellite ATM networks is a new-type broadband satellite communication networks and plays an important role in the global communication networks. However, a major problem encountered for using satellite links to transport ATM cells is the high bit error ratio of satellite links, which severely impact the application of ATM over satellite. Therefore, in order to achieve a fiber-like quality on the satellite links, forward-error-correction codes are important for ATM cells. Considering the error characteristic of satellite links and ATM cell format, a novel LDPC coding scheme that four standard ATM cells being encoded as a whole is presented, which can achieve good performance and do not require to modifying standard ATM protocol. This scheme also makes use of the unequal error protection property of irregular LDPC codes, suitable for stressing protection to ATM cell header. Experiments show that the scheme proposed can distinctly improve bit-error ratio of satellite links and achieve good coding gain.