Partially-Coupled Staircase LDPC Codes for High-Speed Inter-Satellite Communications

In this paper, we propose a rate-compatible partially-coupled staircase low density parity check (PS-LDPC) coding scheme for high speed inter-satellite communications. First, we introduce the encoding process and sliding window decoding (SWD) algorithm of PS-LDPC codes, and we investigate the error floor of component codes, which validate that the PS-LDPC codes with short block-length component code can maintain the reliability, and significantly reduce the decoding latency. Then, we analyze the density evolution (DE) of PS-LDPC codes based on the multi-edge type (MET)- LDPC framework under the Gaussian approximation, and derive its decoding thresholds of SWD. Further, we propose an optimized coupling pattern (OCP) encoding algorithm that achieves the optimal coupling patterns with the minimized threshold by introducing two-stage column permutations, and modify the message exchanges in SWD algorithm according to this encoding algorithm. Moreover, we design a new decoding algorithm, named cascaded SWD (C-SWD) algorithm, which reduces the error floor and enhances decoding performance by pre-decoding, reliability enhancement, and cascading belief propagation (BP) decoder or ordered likelihood decoder (OLD) due to the error floor. Simulation results demonstrate that our PS-LDPC coding scheme outperforms the existing rate-compatible spatially coupled LDPC (SC-LDPC) coding schemes in terms of bit error rate and complexity.