Novel control channel quality improvement in satellite communication systems employing high coding gain FEC

The authors propose a novel control channel quality improvement scheme for satellite communication systems using a majority decision method over convolutional coding and Viterbi decoding channels. To improve majority decision performance, which is degraded by burst errors due to Viterbi decoding in conventional serial transmission methods, a parallel transmission method is proposed. The performance of the parallel and serial transmission methods has been analyzed, and experimenta have been carried out using rate-1/2 convolutional encoding and Viterbi decoding (constraint length 4 and 7). It is shown that the parallel transmission method has about 10¹⁰ times lower block-error performance at P_e = 1 × 10^-4 than the conventional method.