Recent Results on the Use of Concatenated Reed-Solomon/Viterbi Channel Coding and Data Compression for Space Communications

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 emulated
S
-band uplink and
X
-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
^-6
or 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.