Adaptive rateless coding scheme for deep-space Ka-band communications

The deep-space Ka-band channels are very sensitive to the weather conditions of the ground station area, where the data link will be suffered by high dynamic bit error rate and even occurred random interruption. Moreover, the huge distance of the deep-space communications caused that the transmitter can only have delayed channel state information (CSI) feedback. We modeled the noise temperature of the Ka-band link as an N-state Markov model based on the Autoregressive (AR) analysis in this paper, and then proposed a low-error channel state estimation algorithm. Furthermore, we designed an adaptive rateless coding scheme based on Analog fountain codes (AFC), which is capable to adjust code-rate to maximize the usage of the Ka-band link. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme have capacity-approaching performance, can increase system throughput and improve transmission efficiency.