Effective Application of the 3GPP LTE Physical Layer to Mobile Satellite Systems through UL-FEC Protection

In this paper, we consider the adoption of the LTE radio interface for Mobile Satellite Systems (MSS). Indeed, a key factor for the success of mobile satellite systems is the maximization of technology commonalities with terrestrial standards, which enjoy much larger economies of scale. As a consequence, the terrestrial radio interface becomes the baseline for the satellite radio interface, with minimal changes due to diverse propagation conditions. To cope with long satellite channel fading events, without affecting the physical layer interleavers, we introduce robust upper layer coding techniques. The obtained results, that include the analysis of the redundancy split between physical and upper layer coding, demonstrate the effectiveness of this technique in improving the robustness to prolonged channel fades, reaching performance very close to other satellite standards specifically designed for mobile broadcasting, such as DVB-SH.