Adaptive Network Coding Schemes for Satellite Communications

TL;DR

This paper introduces adaptive network coding schemes tailored for satellite communications, improving throughput, delay, and energy efficiency by dynamically adjusting to channel variations and erasures.

Contribution

It presents two novel physical layer aware adaptive network coding and coded modulation schemes specifically designed for time-varying satellite channels.

Findings

Significant throughput, delay, and energy efficiency gains over non-adaptive schemes.

Trade-offs between energy efficiency and delay-throughput performance.

Adaptive schemes outperform classical non-adaptive network coding in satellite scenarios.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose two novel physical layer aware adaptive network coding and coded modulation schemes for time variant channels. The proposed schemes have been applied to different satellite communications scenarios with different Round Trip Times (RTT). Compared to adaptive network coding, and classical non-adaptive network coding schemes for time variant channels, as benchmarks, the proposed schemes demonstrate that adaptation of packet transmission based on the channel variation and corresponding erasures allows for significant gains in terms of throughput, delay and energy efficiency. We shed light on the trade-off between energy efficiency and delay-throughput gains, demonstrating that conservative adaptive approaches that favors less transmission under high erasures, might cause higher delay and less throughput gains in comparison to non-conservative approaches that favor more transmission to account for high erasures.