Unified Satellite and Terrestrial ACM Design

Abstract

First step towards integrating satellite and terrestrial standards at the physical layer is to design a unified packet frame structure, and in particular, a unified adaptive coding and modulation (ACM) scheme without substantial loss in either of the systems. In this paper we introduce a methodology to design such a set of modulation and coding (MODCOD) combinations. In the first step, we design a set of base MODCODs for the AWGN channel. Then, for any other given channel model, we build a new set of MODCODs through a suitable transformation of the base MODCODs. We mainly focus on two types of channels: (a) non-linear satellite channels, and (b) AWGN channels with fading. We compare our results with latest digital video broadcasting standards, namely, DVB-T2 and DVB-S2X. Nomenclature