High speed transmission of reliable data on satellite channels

The use of Forward Error Control (FEC) and Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ) error control techniques for reliable high speed data transmission over a satellite link operating in a TDMA mode is investigated. FEC using convolutional coding with Viterbi decoding and continuous ARQ may not be the most efficient in terms of effective throughput through the channel. A new hybrid ARQ/FEC scheme which yields a higher throughput than either FEC or ARQ alone is presented, noting that its applicability is not limited to the TDMA access method. The power of convolutional encoding and Viterbi decoding is demonstrated when compared to threshold decoding, and by extending convolutional encoding through a combination of coding and modulation, and generalizing the Viterbi algorithm, it is possible to take into account intersymbol interference due to the overall bandpass filtering over the channel.