Design and implementation of variable coding and modulation for LEO high‐resolution Earth observation satellite

Abstract

As LEO (Low Earth Orbit) high-resolution Earth observation satellite needs to transmit a large amount of remote sensing data from the satellite to the ground station, higher downlink capacity still poses a severe challenge to LEO. Therefore, variable coding and modulation (VCM) has become an important scheme to optimize the performance of satellite downlink. In this paper, the downlink VCM system of China Earth observation satellite is studied for the first time. By evaluating the free space loss of the satellite downlink path, a VCM-based satellite downlink system is designed, and a DVB-S2 BCH-LDPC encoded variable bit rate high-order MAPSK modulator is implemented. The maximum channel bit rate can reach 3.5 Gbps. Then, the experimental results of Gaofen-7 satellite, which was launched in November 2019, are carried out which showed that our design method effectively meets the design requirements, and the performance is verified.