Applying Fountain Codes in Deep Space Communication
Long distance and high latency are the essential character of deep space communication, which make it hard to utilize the feedback and retransmission scheme. Therefore, reliable data delivery is guaranteed mainly by channel coding in this application. To improve the packet error performance further, a novel error control scheme is proposed by introducing certain fountain code as outer code of traditional channel code. As fountain codes are capacity achieving on erasure channel, the whole packet error rate in receiver can be reduced. However, the extra overhead brought by fountain codes also depresses the coding gain. In this paper, conditions on which the novel scheme improves the coding performance are analyzed and approaches for specific fountain code selecting are illustrated. Simulation results show that the novel scheme can achieve 0.06 similar to 0.44dB extra coding gain by concatenating a systematic RU(Richardson-Urbanke) code to the LDPC(Low-Density Parity-Check) codes suggested by CCSDS(Consultative Committee for Space Data System).
fountain code deep space communication channel coding concatenated codes eigen-slope