Modulation and Coding Techniques

over Satellite
R.Agarwal

April 2013

HUGHES PROPRIETARY
Modulation Techniques

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 BPSK (Binary Phase-Shift Keying)

 A signal is represented as a vector

 M=2 symbols at the same frequency
 Relative phase shift of 180 degrees (2π/M degrees apart) between symbols with
respect to each other

 Key applications include use in RFID standards due to low power

capability.

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 QPSK

 Quadrature (4-PSK): 4 phases of the carrier and hence 4 symbols

 Since no. of bits, m = log2M, where M is the no. of symbols, we use 2
bits/symbol. Hence the symbols are 11, 01, 00 and 10.
 Relative phase shift of 90 degrees between symbols with respect to each other

 Key applications include use in DVB-S and DVB-S2 standards.

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 Other M-PSK Techniques

 For Example 8-PSK: 8 phases of the carrier and hence 8 symbols

 We use 3 bits/symbol. Hence the symbols are 111, 110, 010 and 011, 001,
000, 100 & 101.
 Relative phase shift of 45 degrees between symbols with respect to each other

 Few applications include DVB-S2 outbound HN gateway systems.

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Comparison between M-PSK
Techniques
BPSK QPSK 8-PSK
• Low data rates since • Better data rates since • Higher data rates
Symbol Rate = Data Symbol Rate = (Data since Symbol Rate =
Rate Rate/2) (Data Rate/3)
• Better for power • Better for power • Better for bandwidth
limited links limited links limited links

• Best Carrier recovery, • Carrier recovery • 8 phase states and

resilient to phase harder than BPSK due hence least resilient
noise due to only 2 to 4 phase states and to phase noise.
phase states hence lesser resilience
to phase noise

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Comparison between M-PSK
Techniques

• Comparison of BPSK, QPSK and 8-PSK constellation charts shown

below with additive Gaussian noise and phase noise added over the
channel in real time.
• Inter-symbol interference will increase if proximity between symbols
reduces, as shown below. Hence more complex demodulation is
required at the receiver.
BPSK QPSK 8-PSK

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BER performance of M-PSK Techniques

• The BER performance of BPSK and QPSK are almost identical.

• At lower Eb/No values, the generation of data errors is dominated by
additive Gaussian noise, with phase noise and non-linearities causing less
degradation in comparison to 8-PSK which operates at higher Eb/No values.

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 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation

 Combination of ASK and PSK, hence varying vector with amplitude & phase.
 Conveys at least 2 digital bit streams over a finite number of atleast 2 carrier
waves, 90°deg out of phase with each other. Multiple amplitude levels possible
(Up-to 3 possible values can be used for 16-QAM) .
 The sum is the vector with varying amplitude and phase positions.

 Key applications include digital television and cable modems.

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 QAM – Constellation diagram

 Constellation points arranged in a square grid with equal horizontal and vertical
spacing between points.
 Common configurations include 16-QAM, 64-QAM and 256-QAM.

Amp Phase Data

A3 A1 225° 0111

A2 A3 135° 0100

A1 315° 1111
A1

A3 247° 0110
A1 A2 A3
A1 135° 0101

A3 337° 1011

A1 225° 0111

A3 225° 0010

 With increasing points, symbols come closer and are hence more
susceptible to noise, hence higher BER. Hence higher SNR is required for
higher order QAMs without increasing the BER.
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Comparison between M-PSK
Techniques and M-QAM
M-PSK (8-PSK*)
• Symbol Rate = (Data
Rate/log2M). E.g. 8-PSK can
carry 3 data bits/ symbol
• The distance between adjacent
symbols keep decreasing for
higher M-values. E.g. 8-PSK
performance is only 0.5dB better
at ¾ data rate in comparison to
16-QAM
• Better on power limited links for
lower values of M
• Better on bandwidth limited for
higher values of M
• Demodulator must detect only
phase state.
M-QAM
• 16-QAM can carry 4 bits/symbol
and 64-QAM can carry
6-bits/symbol. Hence higher data
rate transmission capability and
hence higher spectral efficiency.
• QAM achieves greater distance
between adjacent points in the I-
Q plane. Hence, it is more
resilient to phase noise in
comparison to PSK.
• Better for bandwidth limited links
• Demodulator must detect both
phase and amplitude, hence more
complex receiver.
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 Offset – QPSK (OQPSK)

 This differs from a normal OPSK operation by having In-phase (Ik ) modulating
bit stream and quadrature (Qk) bit stream offset from each other by half a
symbol period.
 The phase of the carrier changes only +/- 90° or 0° every bit period
 This avoids the large phase change of 180° when changing both Ik and Qk
simultaneously and hence results in a reduced envelope variation when the
modulated carrier is filtered.

QPSK

OQPSK

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 Demodulation Techniques

 Coherent Demodulation
 The received modulated carrier is multiplied by the reference carrier that is
delivered at the output of the carrier recovery circuit
 The result is low pass filtered and an output voltage that is proportional to
the phase of the carrier, is recovered.
 By comparing the voltage and the zero threshold of the detector, the bit
value is decided by the bit timing recovery circuit.

Coherent BPSK Demodulation

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 Demodulation Techniques

 Differential Demodulation
 The modulated carrier is delayed by the duration of a bit period.
 The carrier is multiplied by the delayed output of the line.
 The result of the multiplication is filtered by a low pass filter.
 The eventual output mk is determined by the sign of the output from the low
pass filter i.e. ½*Cos(θk – θk-1 ). The demodulator essentially detects phase
changes
Differential BPSK Demodulation

• Differential Demodulation displays a significant degradation in

performance for M>2. Hence it is not used for higher order PSKs.
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BER performance of M-PSK and M-QAM
Techniques

 8-PSK only provides 0.5dB of an advantage but at ¾ data rates in

comparison to 16-QAM. Hence, it is not used very commonly.
• Systems that require very high spectral efficiencies generally use QAM.

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 QAM Limitations

• More sensitive to transponder non-linearity and thus requires a higher amplifier

output back off (Typical OBO from 3 to 5dB).
 If the transponder is driven to saturation it compresses the external points of the
squared constellation and does not demonstrate a constant envelope.
 Non-Linear effects lead to inter-symbol interference and change in the points
position on the constellation chart.
 Requires pre-compensation techniques and linearizers at every stage which adds
to cost.
 On the constellation diagrams shown below, a comparison is done between 16-
QAM with and without pre-distortion

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 APSK – Amplitude and Phase Shift
Keying
 APSK combines amplitude and phase shift keying and provides an improvement
on QAM since it uses fewer amplitude levels.
 E.g. 16 APSK shall use 2 amplitude levels in comparison to 3 levels on 16-QAM.
 Lesser amplitude levels in APSK is more beneficial since the modulation is less
sensitive to the transponder non-linearity. Hence amplitude and phase of
symbols can be modified at the modulator to overcome the non-linear effects
instead of additional linearisers and hardware complexity at later stages.
 On the constellation diagrams, the carrier plots can be spread to 2 concentric
circles for 16-APSK in comparison to the square grid used for a 16-QAM
constellation with 3 possible amplitude levels.
16-APSK 16-QAM

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BER performance of 16-APSK and
16-QAM Techniques
 16-APSK requires a slightly higher Eb/No and more pre-distortion in the
modulator at the uplink station but it better suited than QAM in terms of
complexity and cost to overcome the non-linear effects of the transponder.
 16-APSK is used as a modulation scheme for DVB-S2

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Coding Techniques

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 Coding Basics

 Bit Error Rate is defined as the rate, after decoding, at which errors occur in the
transmission medium.
 The objective of FEC (Forward Error Correction) coding is to achieve good
capacities by increasing the transmitted bit rate above the information rate which
is done by introducing redundancy into the system.
 The ratio of information to transmitted bit rate is called Code Rate, ρ.

 Types of Codes
 Block Codes (e.g. BCH Codes, LDPC Codes)
 Convolutional Codes
 Turbo Codes
HUGHES PROPRIETARY
 Block Codes

 For Block Codes, the information is divided into blocks of ‘k’ bits which are then
coded into ‘n’ bits (where n>k) known as code-words.
 The block code is represented as a ( n, k) code.
 Coding of one block is independent of the other block and hence these codes are
convenient when information is naturally divided into blocks.
 Hamming distance dmin represents the smallest number of bits in any code-word
that needs to be altered to produce another code-word. If it is desired to detect ‘s’
errors in any code-word and correct ‘t’ of them (t≤s) then the hamming distance
should be

dmin > s + t

 Example of such codes are Bose, Chaudhari and Hocquenghem (BCH) codes
which are cyclic codes.
 Block Codes are less sensitive to burst errors and hence preferred in fading or
unstable conditions.

HUGHES PROPRIETARY
Block Coding - BCH Codes

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 Reed Solomon Codes

 A type of cyclic BCH code

 The block code is represented as a ( 204, 188) code since it has 188 information
bytes and 16 redundant bytes, when used in DVB-S concatenated configuration
with inner convolutional coding.
 Redundant symbols are generated using a generator polynomial at the encoder.
 In the decoder, error location and magnitude are calculated using the same
generator polynomial.
 Reed Solomon Codes demonstrate lower coding gains in comparison to LDPC
and Turbo Codes but are less complex to implement.

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 Block Coding - LDPC Codes

 LDPC codes can be operated close to capacity (Shannon Hartley Limit) for a lot
of channels using linear time complex algorithms for decoding.
 They are constructed using a sparse bipartite graph.
 It is defined by a sparse parity check matrix which has fewer 1’s in comparison to
the number of 0’s.Example shown below.

 In the matrix shown above, each row represents ‘one of the four’ parity
constraints and each column represents ‘one of the eight’ bits in the received
code-word, to be decoded.
 Represented as ( n, k) LDPC codes where ‘n’ represents the number of variable
nodes and (n-k) represents the number of constraint nodes.

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 Block Coding - LDPC Codes

 Tanner Graph corresponding to the parity check matrix (shown in previous slide).

• The c_node or ‘check node’ represents the parity bits and the v_node or variable
nodes represent the number of bits in the code-word.
• Completely random chosen codes provide high probability but encoder
complexity tends to become very high.
• LDPC codes are widely used in DVB-S2 as the inner block encoder in a
concatenated configuration.

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 Block Coding - LDPC Decoding

 E.g. of a code-word to be decoded, c =[1 0 0 1 0 1 0 1] which has one bit error

due to the channel, causing the code-word to be c’ = [1 1 0 1 0 1 0 1]

• Step 1: The v-node sends a message to c-node, with a bit they believe to be
correct.(received bits at c-node from v-node)
• Step 2: A c-node looks at the bits from the other 3 v-nodes and calculates the bit
that needs to be sent to the 4th v-node to satisfy the parity check equation.
(transmitted bits from c-node to v-node)

HUGHES PROPRIETARY
 Block Coding - LDPC Decoding

• Step 3: Based on a majority vote from the received bit sent from v-node to c-
node initially (yi) and the sent bits from the c-node to the v-nodes in order to
make a decision on the code-word.

• Step 4: Once a hard decision is made the next code-word in the matrix is sent to
the check node and the whole process is repeated till a decision is made for that
code-word.

• Hard decision decoding is used very rarely. Soft decision decoding which is used
more frequently also works on a similar principle.
• LDPC codes are decoded iteratively like turbo codes but have less complexity
per iteration. However overall complexity can be high if there are more iterations.
• LDPC codes have lower error floors than Turbo Codes. HUGHES PROPRIETARY
 Convolutional Codes

 For convolutional codes, the information in frames of k bits at the input of the
encoder is converted into n bits at the output. Hence code rate = k/n
 The encoder retains some memory of the previous input frames and uses this
memory in the encoding .The number of previous frames retained can be
demoted by a memory order ‘m’. Hence the code can be termed as (n, k, m)
 Uses Viterbi decoding algorithm which works on modelling the possible state
transitions of the encoder and finding the output sequence that matches most
closely to that received by the decoder.
 Convolutional codes are suitable to use in stable link conditions where errors only
occur randomly.
 Also incorporates for soft decision using Viterbi decoding which increases the
power of the codes.
 However due to the retention of memory of previous, these codes can suffer from
large overheads on short transmission.
 Also when a long stream of decoding errors are produced using the Viterbi
algorithm, the time to re-establish correct decoding and resynchronize is difficult
to predict.

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 Turbo Codes

 Utilizes divide and conquer strategy by splitting and decoding each part of the
code using the parallel concatenation which enables the use of simpler decoders.
 Better for decoding high weight code-words (with more 1s), as they can be
distinguished more easily.
 Uses interleaving to provide better weight distribution
 Soft In Soft Out (SISO) decoding process used to enhance the decoder decision
and also maximize the gain from decoder interaction

 Capacity approaching codes, especially for low weight code-words and hence in
competition with LDPC codes. However in comparison to LDPC codes, Turbo
codes are affected by error floors for low weight code-words.
 Require larger minimum distance between codes and larger frame and inter-
leaver sizes to operate at lower BER floors. However, larger block sizes lead to
more latency.
HUGHES PROPRIETARY
 Interleaving

 Interleaving is a way of improving the performance of convolutional/turbo coding

with respect to burst of errors.
 The main function of interleaving is to randomize the ordering of the encoded bits
before transmission. Hence at the decoder the possibility of receiving burst errors
is minimized by creating a uniform distribution of errors.
 However, Interleaving contributes to latency as the entire interleaved block must
be received before the packet can be decoded.
 Interleaving can be performed using the techniques shown in the diagram below.

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Comparison between LDPC and Turbo
Coding
LDPC Coding
• Encoding complexity is high but
decoding complexity is lower
• Block length is less than that of
turbo codes and hence error
correcting capabilities are also
slightly better.
Turbo Coding
• Encoding complexity is lower but
decoding complexity is higher.
• Since turbo codes are affected by
error floors, larger code lengths
and more interleaving is required
which adds to latency and
degrades performance w.r.t LDPC
Codes.
HUGHES PROPRIETARY
 Concatenated Encoding/Decoding

 Block and Convolutional coding can also be used in a concatenated encoding

scheme which incorporates an outer block encoder with an inner encoder.
 At the receiving end, the inner decoder corrects errors at the output of the
demodulator.
 The outer decoder corrects the errors that are residual from the inner decoding
process and exceed the correcting capability of the inner decoder algorithms
 Interleavers and De-Interleavers can also be implemented between the inner and
outer coders to improve overall bit error performance.
 For DVB-S, a block and convolutional coding scheme are combined to produce a
concatenated configuration whereas for DVB-S2 two block code schemes are
used to provide the same function.

Outer Inner
encoder encoder

Channel

Outer Inner
decoder decoder

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 DVB-S Concatenated Encoding/Decoding

 DVB-S uses a concatenated configuration which has a Reed-Solomon Outer

Encoder (code rate, ρ =188/204) and an inner encoder with convolutional coding
which has code rates of (1/2, 2/3, 3/4, 5/6 and 7/8)

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 DVB-S2 Concatenated Encoding/Decoding

 DVB-S2 uses a concatenated configuration which has a BCH Outer Encoder and
an inner encoder with LDPC Codes with code rates of (1/4, 1/3, 2/5,1/2 , 3/5, 2/3,
3/4, 4/5, 5/6, 8/9 and 9/10)

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Channel Decoding Performance

 At the decoder input, a bit rate

Rc corresponds to a Bit Error
Rate of BEPin which in turn
is a function of Ec/No
depending on the
coding/modulation scheme
used.

 At the decoder output, the

recovered baseband signal
with the original data rate Rb
corresponds to a Bit Error
Rate of BEPout which is a
function of Eb/No

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Channel Decoding Performance

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Coding with variable Bandwidth

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Coding with variable Bandwidth

• Hence as code rate, ρ ↓ power requirement ↓ but bandwidth requirement ↑

as can be seen from the figure shown below.

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Coding with constant Bandwidth Requirement

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Power vs. Bandwidth using Coding

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 References

 Gerad Maral: Satellite Communications Systems – Systems, Techniques and

Technology – 5th Edition
 Barry Evans: Satellite Communication Systems – 2nd Edition
 Bernhard M.J.Leinher: LDPC Codes – A Brief Tutorial
 Emilia Casper: Turbo Codes
 Phase Shift Keying: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_shift_keying
 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qam

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