A Robust Error Control System for Broadcast Channels

We have proposed a robust error-control system for a broadcast environment. The system is a combination of FEC and ARQ schemes. We use a cascaded coding scheme with a binary inner code and an interleaved non-binary outer code. The decoding policy is chosen so that we make optimum use of outer code's error correcting capability. The system also has a parity retransmission feature. We use a dynamic programming optimization method to optimize the throughput. We show that this system achieves very high reliability and high channel utilization even at extremely high bit-error-rates (/spl les/ 10/sup -2/). The scheme is suitable for high speed data transfer even when the channels are noisy.