A hybrid ARQ scheme with adaptive forward error correction for satellite communications

A hybrid automatic-repeat-request system combined with adaptive forward error correction (ARQ/AFEC) which adaptively alters the error-correcting capability according to channel state using a nonsystematic Reed-Solomon code is presented. It is shown that the system can alter the error-correcting capability by varying the number of information symbols fed to the decoder only and not change the hardware of the encoder. Performance evaluations indicate that the ARQ/AFEC system has much higher frame efficiency than ARQ without AFEC for low-bit error rate and has high frame efficiency in a wide range of bit error rates.