A 155 Mbit/s FEC codec for satellite B-ISDN

The Centre was awarded a contract with the International Telecommunications Satellite Organisation (INTELSAT) for the development of a codec to support satellite transmission of 155.52 Mbit/s Broadband ISDN. The codec is designed to be used with an 8PSK soft-decision modem, with the purpose of achieving excellent power efficiency while at the same time constraining the signal bandwidth such that the transmission can be accommodated by a single 72 MHz transponder. This is achieved through the concatenation of a recently discovered multi-dimensional trellis code and a powerful Reed-Solomon block code.