Joint spatial diversity and network coding in satellite communications

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on the transmission reliability in satellite communications. In current algorithms, traditional Spatial Diversity (SD) was investigated to resist wireless channel fading. However, intermittent connections between satellites lead to the higher system outage probability. To solve this problem, we propose a novel joint SD and Systematic Random Linear Network Coding (SRLNC) transmission scheme, namely SD-SRLNC. For time-varying satellite channels, we assume that all the source-satellite links are ON/OFF channels, and then model the satellite transmission between ON and OFF states by using the two-state Markov chain. Following this, we discuss the procedure of SD-SRLNC, and provide a theoretical analysis on its effectiveness of resisting the fading in satellite channel. Furthermore, the expressions of outage probability and Bit Error Rate (BER) for the proposed scheme are derived respectively. Simulation results show that the proposed SD-SRLNC can improve the BER performance and reduce the outage probability compared with other existing transmission schemes.