We describe a method for estimating satellite link quality for use with rain fade countermeasures. The method applies to convolutionally encoded bit streams. It is based on the measurement of the uncoded data bit-error rate (BER) which is estimated by monitoring the errors recovered by a Viterbi decoder. Using a previously developed attenuation model, the measurement time intervals are optimized for a simple application, and the performance of the estimator is shown
Published in:
Communications, IEEE Transactions on
(Volume:46
,
Issue:
4
)
Date of Publication: Apr 1998