Comparative Analysis of Polar and LDPC Codes in Space and Satellite Communication Systems

Satellite and space communication systems have received a lot of attention as crucial transmission frameworks in recent years. In these systems, the signal is mostly degraded by fast amplitude and phase changes (fading), which cause error bursts. Hence, robust error-correcting codes that can handle error bursts are necessary for space and satellite transmissions of good quality. Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes and polar codes were adopted as coding schemes in the modern 5G communication standard. A lot of research was conducted on their performance over memoryless channels, but their error correction capability over channels with memory is a less researched area. In this study, we examine and compare the error-correcting performance of LDPC codes and polar codes in channels with memory specified by a correlated Rayleigh channel model. We evaluate the error-correcting capabilities of LDPC and polar decoding algorithms in a correlated Rayleigh fading channel with different correlation coefficients. Also, we optimize the construction of the polar code for fading channels and present the simulation results comparing it to the 5G polar code construction.