An efficient multi-relay transmission scheme using LDGM code for satellite burst erasure channel

Since the first success of satellite laser communication experiments, their developments and researches have been much studied as a new satellite communication technology. From those experimental results, it is known that an instantaneous degradation of received optical power and link disconnection occur due to air turbulence or tracking error in the satelliteto-ground laser transmission. Therefore, forward error correction (FEC) is needed to achieve a high-quality transmission and the application of low-density parity check (LDPC) code for the satellite laser communication has been proposed. However, further application of land mobile communication techniques for achieving higher capacity is not fully discussed. One of the candidates of this application for more efficient satellite laser communication is a multi-hop transmission, which can be applied for geostationary satellite (GEO)-to-ground or deep space-to-ground links. Therefore, we propose a multi-relay cooperative LDPC transmission scheme for satellite laser communications to obtain an improved transmission quality with lower decoding complexity. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated by computer simulations.