Low-Density Parity Check-Code in DVB-S2 versus Polar Code under SATCOM Fading

In wireless terrestrial or satellite communications systems, the communication system engineers use many factors and techniques to combat the channel degradation. For example, the digital video broadcasting – second generation (DVB-S2) satellite communication system includes the adaptive code modulation (ACM), i.e., various combinations of modulation types and forward error correction (FEC) code rates. The Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) code and low-density parity-check (LDPC) with various code rates are used as FEC codes to reduce the channel degradation. On the other hand, the polar FEC code is a more recently developed technique than the LDPC FEC code and has been used in fifth-generation (5G), third-generation partnership project (3GPP) wireless terrestrial communications to improve the channel capacity. The 5G 3GPP terrestrial communications also use the orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation in addition to the polar FEC code. The objective of this paper is to study how to replace the LDPC FEC code in the DVB-S2 satellite communication system with the 5G terrestrial polar FEC code and OFDM, and compare bit error rate (BER) performance under the multipath Rayleigh fading channel environment. All other components in the DVB-S2 system, such as code word length, interleaver size, modulation, etc., are unchanged. This paper investigates the performance of the DVB-S2 ACM scheme by replacing the LDPC FEC code with the polar FEC code, and presents the required symbol energy-to-noise power spectral density ratio to achieve a BER equal to 10 −5 . Then, this paper claims that performance over the current DVB-S2 communication system can be enhanced by using the polar FEC code and OFDM.