A form of data transmission which is increasing in
popularity is satellite communication. In order to insure
that data is received correctly, certain error control
strategies are employed. In packetized transmission,
automatic-repeat-request (ARQ) schemes and error correcting
codes have been employed. Currently a combination of both
is not employed by the AX.25 protocol. The purpose of this
project is to determine which error correcting code should
be combined with ARQ to provide the optimum performance.
This project investigates the performance of the (7,4)
Hamming code, (23,12) Golay code, Reed-Solomon, RS , codes
over the Galois fields of 16, GF(16), and 256, GF(256),
elements, and common rate convolutional codes of various
constraint lengths. The codes are evaluated on three
primary criteria, which include: throughput vs. input bit
error rate, coding complexity, and burst error performance.
The class of Reed-Solomon codes over GF(256) was chosen
to be superior due to the throughput and burst error
performance. The encoding complexity is small, but the
decoding is more complicated. The conclusion is that error
correcting codes should be employed in ARQ satellite
systems. However, the error correcting strength of the code
must be determined by observing the channel characteristics.
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