Robustness of satellite telecommand links to jamming attacks

This paper addresses the issue of improving the robustness of the Telecommand & Telemetry (TT&C) link to jamming. It is well known that the use of spread spectrum communication techniques helps to provide a high level of protection which is usually requested in military applications. In this paper we focus on the use of channel coding to enhance the anti-jamming capabilities. Forward Error Correction (FEC) is already foreseen in the standard ECSS (European Cooperation for Space Standardization). In particular, a fixed data packet has been conventionally defined; the data packet is formatted with a Bose - Chaudhuri - Hocquenghem (BCH) code, upon which additional protection can be applied at the data link layer. Nevertheless, as it will be shown in this paper, the BCH code does not work properly when the communication channel is affected by burst errors. The paper compares the performance of several channel coding techniques, whose application does not require modifications to the current standard. The performance evaluation will be carried out for different types of jammers in order to identify a solution able to provide a good trade-off between robustness to jamming and latency, which is also a strict requirement in this application.