Recent Results on the Use of Concatenated Reed-Solomon/Viterbi Channel Coding and Data Compression for Space Communications
Kuang Liu, Jun-Ji Lee · IEEE Transactions on Communications · 1984
The development of sophisticated adaptive source coding algorithms together with inherent error sensitivity problems fostered the need for efficient space communication at very low bit error probilbilities(\leq 10^{-6}). This led to the specification and implementation of a concatenated coding system using an interleaved Reed-Solomon code as the outer code and a Viterbi-decoded convolutionai code as the inner code. This paper presents the experimental results of this channel coding system under an emulatedS-band uplink andX-band downlink two-way space communication channel, where both uplink and downlink have strong carrier power. Test results verify that at a bit error probability of 10-6or less, this concatenated coding system does provide a coding gain of 2.5 dB or more over the viterbi-decoded convolutional-only coding system. These tests also show that a desirable interleaving depth for the Reed-Solomon outer code is 8 or more. The imptict of this "virtually" error-free space communication link on the transmission of images is discussed and examples of Simulation results are given.