1
Using LTE in 4G Satellite Communications:
Increasing Time Diversity through Forced
Retransmission
M. Papaleo, M. Neri, A. Vanelli-Coralli, and G.E. Corazza
University of Bologna, DEIS-ARCES, Viale Risorgimento, 2 - 40136 Bologna, Italy
email: {mpapaleo, mneri, avanelli, gecorazza}@arces.unibo.it
Abstract—In this paper, we investigate the applicability of
the 3GPP Long Term Evolution standard to mobile satellite
systems. In order to counteract the satellite specific propagation
conditions, we propose a novel inter-TTI (Transmission Time
Interval) interleaving technique allowing to break the channel
correlation in slowly time varying channels. The Inter-TTI
transmission is achieved through the reuse of the existing HARQ
facilities provided by the LTE physical layer. Simulation results
show that the proposed technique can be successfully used to
improve the performance of the LTE physical layer when applied
to the transmission over satellite links. Performance improvement
depends on the considered parameters, while complexity can be
traded off with the data rate to achieve the best quality of service
for the considered system.
Index Terms—LTE, Satellite, Circular Buffer, Forced Retrans-
mission.
I. I NTRODUCTION
3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) [1] is gaining momentum
and will be an important player in the 4G scenario along
with other emerging technologies such as mobile WiMAX
(i.e., IEEE 802.16e). One of the key factors for the successful
deployment of mobile satellite systems in 4G networks is
the maximization of the technology commonalities with the
terrestrial systems, in order maintain implementation costs
to a minimum. An effective way of achieving this objective
consists in considering the terrestrial radio interface as the
baseline for the satellite radio interface, introducing only
those modifications that are strictly needed to deal with the
satellite peculiarities, such, for example, non linear distortion
introduced by the on-board power amplifiers, long round-trip
propagation times, and reduced time diversity.
In this framework, an important aspect of the 3GPP LTE
physical layer that has to be considered when dealing with
satellite systems is the absence of a large time interleaving able
to cope with long channel fades. In the terrestrial deployment,
channel fading is in fact dealt with by exploiting those
frequency bands experiencing satisfactory channel conditions
and through Hybrid Automatic Repeat-reQuest (HARQ) tech-
niques. However, neither of these techniques is efficient in
satellite environments where the large round trip delay hinders
the accuracy of the channel quality indicators and sounding
signals, continuously exchanged between users and the base
station to keep updated channel estimates, and of the HARQ
acknowledgement messages. Therefore, alternative techniques
978-1-4244-2573-0/08/$25.00 ©2008 IEEE
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have to be designed in order to increase link reliability. In this
paper, we propose an inter-TTI (Transmission Time Interval)
interleaving technique that is able to break the channel cor-
relation in slowly varying channels by exploiting the existing
HARQ facilities provided by the LTE physical layer.
The paper is organized as follows: in section II a brief
overview of the LTE standard is provided, section III gives
a detailed description of the proposed inter TTI interleaving
technique. Section IV describes the channel models considered
for the analysis, which is reported in V. Finally, conclusions
are given in section VI.
II. LTE P HYSICAL L AYER OVERVIEW
3GPP LTE is the name given to a project within the Third
Generation Partnership Project to improve the UMTS mobile
phone standard to cope with future requirements. Goals in-
clude improving efficiency, lowering costs, improving services,
making use of new spectrum opportunities, and better integra-
tion with other open standards. The ability to provide high bit
rates is a key measure for LTE. LTE standardization activities
are progressing at a fast pace, and specifications are being
finalized for physical and access layers. For what concerns
this study, we refer to the physical layer specifications.
A general block diagram of the LTE transmitter is shown in
figure 1. The main ingredients of the LTE physical layer are the
adoption of turbo codes [2], OFDM modulation, and multiple-
input-multiple-output (MIMO) techniques [1]. The adopted
turbo coding scheme is characterized by a fixed code rate equal
to 1/3. Nevertheless, the rate matching increases the system
flexibility by allowing to reach variable code-rate by means
of puncturing and repetition. In particular, the rate matching
block takes as input each of the three streams coming from the
encoder, and performs interleaving and interlacing as shown in
Figure 2. The interleaved and interlaced bits are then written in
a Virtual Circular Buffer. Eight redundancy versions (RV) are
defined, each specifying a starting bit index in the buffer. The
transmitter reads a block of coded bits from the buffer, starting
from the bit index specified by a chosen RV. Different RVs are
used for different retransmissions, so as to transmit different
parts of the coded word in different time instants, decreasing
the overall code rate after each retransmission. For a desired
code rate of operation, the number of coded bits to be selected
for transmission is calculated and passed to the rate matching
 2

HIGHER TURBO RATE

MAPPER
LAYERS ENCODER MATCHING
LTE
FRAME
OFDM PREDI
HPA
MOD STORTER
FORMAT
Fig. 1. LTE Trasmitter Block Diagram.
block as an input. If the end of the buffer is reached and more
coded bits are needed for transmission, the transmitter wraps
around and continues at the beginning of the buffer, hence the
term of “circular buffer”. Therefore, puncturing and repetition
can be achieved using a single method [3]. The bits output
by the rate matching block are then mapped into a QPSK or
16QAM constellation. The modulated symbols are arranged
into a frame structure, multiplexed with pilots symbols, and
allocated to the OFDM subcarriers by means of the OFDM
modulator.
In the following a possible alternative way of using these
facilities is described, with the aim of obtaining an overall
result equivalent to an inter-TTI interleaving technique.
III. I NTER -TTI I NTERLEAVING
As already mentioned in section I, the LTE standard does
not foresee any time interleaving techniques outside a TTI.
Thus, since the physical layer codeword is mapped into one
TTI, the maximum time diversity exploitable by the Turbo
decoder is just the duration of one TTI (TT T I ). For low to
medium terminal speeds, channel coherence time is larger than
TT T I , thus fading events cannot be counteracted by physical
layer channel coding. In order to cope with such a fading
events, LTE exploits both “intelligent” scheduling algorithms
based on the knowledge of channel coefficients both in the
existing HARQ facilities adapting them to the satellite use. To
this aim, we propose a novel forced retransmission technique,
which basically consists in transmitting the bits carried in
the same circular buffer within several TTIs, that acts as an
inter-TTI interleaving. To do this, we can exploit the same
mechanism as provided by the LTE Technical Specification for
the HARQ operations with circular buffer. The block diagram
of the devised technique is depicted in figure 2. As it can be
seen, 4 retransmissions are obtained by using 4 different RVs,
starting from 0 up to 3. Each of the 4 transmission bursts is
mapped into different TTIs, spaced by KT T I ·TT T I . KT T I is a
key parameter because it determines the interleaving depth and
it should be set according to channel conditions and latency
requirements. It is straightforward to derive the maximum time
diversity achievable by adopting such as technique. Let call
RT T I the number of retransmissions needed to complete the
transmission of a single circular buffer, LSU B the number
of OFDM symbols transmitted in each retransmission, and
TSU B the duration of LSU B OFDM symbols1 . We have that
a codeword is spread over total protection time TT P T =
KT T I · (RT T I − 1) · TT T I + TT T I .
Given the fact that the standard facilities are used, no
additional complexity is introduced. The drawback involved
with the use of such technique is the data rate reduction,
brought about by the fact that one codeword is not transmitted
in TT T I but in TT P T . A possible way to maintain the original
data rate is to introduce in the terminals the capability of
storing larger quantities of data, equivalent to the possibility
to support multiple HARQ processes in terminals designed for
terrestrial use. In this way, capacity and memory occupation
grow linearly with the number of supported equivalent HARQ
processes, and is upper bounded by the data rate of the original
link without inter-TTI.
S
sub-block
interleaver 1st Tx
RV=0
Circular Buffer

time and in the frequency dimension, and HARQ techniques. TURBO P1 2nd Tx
The former technique consists in exploiting the channel state ENCODER Interleaver
RV=1

information (CSI) in order to map data into sub-carriers and

Interlacer 3rd Tx
characterized by high signal to noise ratio (good channel P2 RV=2

quality). Of course this technique shows great benefits when 4th Tx

RV=3
frequency diversity is present within the active subcarriers.
The HARQ consists in the “cooperation” between Forward
Error Correction (FEC) with ARQ protocols. In LTE, HARQ
operation is performed by exploiting the virtual circular buffer
1st Tx 2nd Tx 3rd Tx 4th Tx
described in section II. Orthogonal retransmissions can be ob- f RV=0 RV=1 RV=2 RV=3

tained by setting the Redundancy Version number in each re-

transmission, thus transmitting different patterns of bits within … … … …

the same circular buffer. Of course, HARQ technique yields

t
to great performance improvement when time correlation is TTI

present because retransmission can have a time separation KTTI

greater than channel coherence time.

Unfortunately, neither of the aforementioned techniques can Fig. 2. Rate Matching and Virtual Circular Buffer.
be directly applied to the satellite case due to the exceedingly
large transmission delays, affecting both the reliability of
the channel quality indicators and of the acknowledgements. 1 The duration of the OFDM symbol T
OF DM is intended to be the sum
Nevertheless, it is possible to devise a way to exploit the of the useful symbol and cyclic prefix duration.

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 3

IV. S CENARIO AND C HANNEL M ODEL In addition, to properly model the satellite link, a High
Power Amplifier (HPA) is introduced within the satellite
In our analysis we assume a scenario in which GEO satellite
channel. Power amplifiers are typically operated close to the
broadcasts services to mobile terminals, and one or more Com-
saturation region to maximize output power and operating ef-
plementary Ground Components (CGC) are foreseen in order
ficiency. Under these operating conditions, non-negligible non
to expand the service availability and coverage. Both satellite
linear distortion is introduced, increasing significant spectral
and terrestrial components work at the same frequency, thus re-
regrowth and in-band distortion. These effects can impair the
alizing a Single Frequency Network (SFN). In order to model
use of high order modulations and severely reduce system
this hybrid terrestrial/satellite scenario, we follow the work
capacity, due to the increased adjacent channel interference. To
done in [5]. In particular we adopt the channel model named
mitigate and keep under control non linear distortion effects,
case number 5. This channel derives from the assumption
we introduce a waveform predistorter. The details regarding
having a line-of-sight link coming from one satellite, three
the HPA and the predistorter adopted in our system model
terrestrial repeaters, and receiver located in an open area in
are given in [4]. The adopted HPA is a Traveling-Wave
an urban environment. The resulting propagation model is
Tube Amplifier (TWTA), while the predistorer is a fractional
characterized by ten paths. The line of sight path is modeled
predistorter based on Look Up Table [7]. The HPA is assumed
by a Ricean distribution with Rice Factor equal to 7dB, while
to work with an Input Back-Off (IBO) of 4dB.
the remaining paths, pertaining to the complementary ground
components, are Rayleigh distributed. The corresponding de-
lay spread results to be Td = 1.774μs (see [5] for details). V. N UMERICAL R ESULTS
Terminal motion is taken into account by considering the In this section we report the numerical results obtained
Doppler spread. Two different speed are analyzed, that are through computer simulation. LTE provides a wide range
ν = 3kph and ν = 30kph. If a 3D representation of the of parameters which can be set based on the application
isotropic angle of arrivals is assumed, the resulting Doppler scenario. Here we made the following assumptions: the LTE
spectrum can be simply modelled through a rectangular shape signal is transmitted in a 5M Hz band located in S band
according to [6] yielding to an autocorrelation function with (carrier frequency f0 = 2GHz), the sub-carrier spacing is
a sinc behavior. Let us call fdm the maximum Doppler shift Δf = 15KHz, FFT size = 2048, TT T I = 1ms. In one
associated with the terminal motion, which is a function of TTI 12 OFDM symbols are transmitted, the OFDM symbols
the terminal speed ν according to the relation: time TOF DM is 83.33μs, while the cyclic prefix duration is
v TCP = 16.67μs. Therefore, the most important constraint of
fdm = f0 , (1) OFDM modulation is satisfied, that is:
c
being c the speed of light, equal to 3 · 108 m/s. The channel TCP > Td (3)
coherence time Tc , representing of the channel memory in the The turbo encoder is fed with 4096 information bits, while
time domain can be expressed as a function of the maximum the Virtual Circular Buffer size is assumed to be 6300, thus
Doppler spread: resulting in an actual system code rate R  2/5. Under
1 1 this condition, the system can provide up to 2.5mbps3 . All
Tc = , (2)
Kc 2fdm simulations consider QPSK modulation.
where Kc is a proportionality factor depending on the actual The curves show the bit error rate (BER) and block error
threshold selected to delimit the support of the autocorrelation rate (BLER) performance versus Eb /N0 , with Eb being the
function2 . It is easy to show that under this assumption energy per information bit and N0 the one-sided noise power
the channel coherence time results to be Tc  90ms and spectral density. The solid line curves represent the case in
Tc  9ms for ν = 3kph and ν = 30kph, respectively. which the number of transmitted OFDM symbols for each
As a consequence, the inter TTI interleaver parameters must retransmission (LSU B ) is 1, resulting in a total number of
be chosen in order to cope with such as channel correlation retransmissions RT T I = 12, while the dashed line curves
time. In table I, channel coherence time Tc , the selected inter depict the case with LSU B = 3 and RT T I = 4. In all the
TTI interleaver parameters LSU B and RT T I , and the resulting considered configurations we set the value of KT T I such
total protection time TT P T are reported for the two considered that the total protection time TT T I is larger than the channel
terminal speed. coherence time Tc (see Table I). Figures 3 and 4 represent the
BER and BLER performance for the of 30kph (Tc  9ms).
TABLE I In this scenario the simulated values KT T I are 4, 8, 16. As
I NTER TTI PARAMETERS AND T OTAL P ROTECTION T IME it can be observed, the solid line curves always outperform
the dashed line ones. This is easily explained considering the
ν [kph] LSU B RT T I KT T I [ms] Tc [ms] TT P T [ms]
3 3, (1) 4, (12) 40 90 121,(441) different diversity granularity: in the case of LSU B = 1 each
3 3, (1) 4, (12) 80 90 321,(881) OFDM symbol composing a TTI is transmitted in a separate
3 3, (1) 4, (12) 160 90 481,(1761)
30 3, (1) 4, (12) 4 9 13,(45) TTI. Therefore the codeword spanned over the 12 OFDM
30 3, (1) 4, (12) 8 9 33,(89) symbols composing the TTI can benefit of diversity degree
30 3, (1) 4, (12) 16 9 49,(177)
3 This represents the achievable data rate when no inter TTI interleaving is
2 In our analysis we fix Kc = 1. taken into account.

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 4

0
10
equal to 12. On the other hand, if the case of LSU B = 3 NO interTTI
interTTI, L
SUB
= 1, K
TTI
=40

is taken into account the degree diversity is reduced to 4. interTTI, L

SUB
= 3, K
TTI
=40
interTTI, LSUB = 1, KTTI=80

The same considerations still hold for Figures 5 and 6, where interTTI, LSUB = 3, KTTI=80
interTTI, LSUB = 1, KTTI=160
terminal speed is assumed to be 3kph. In this case the KT T I
−1
10
interTTI, LSUB = 3, KTTI=160

values we have considered are 40, 80, 160. It worth noticing

the large performance enhancement yielded by the adoption of

BER
−2
the inter TTI technique. Looking at Figure 4, at BLER equal 10

to 10−3 , the performance gain goes up to 6dB in the case of

LSU B = 1, and up to 4dB considering LSU B = 3. The same
behavior can be observed in Figure 6. This is due to the fact −3
10

that the ratio between TT P T and Tc is almost the same taking

into account the two cases (see Table I).
−4
0
10
10 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16
NO interTTI Eb/N0 [dB]
interTTI, LSUB = 1, KTTI=4
interTTI, LSUB = 3, KTTI=4
interTTI, L
SUB
= 1, K
TTI
=8 Fig. 5. BER vs Eb /N0 . Terminal speed = 3kph.
interTTI, LSUB = 3, KTTI=8
−1 interTTI, LSUB = 1, KTTI=16
10
interTTI, L = 3, K =16
SUB TTI 0
10
NO interTTI
interTTI, LSUB = 1, KTTI=40
interTTI, L = 3, K =40
SUB TTI
interTTI, L = 1, K =80
BER

−2 SUB TTI
10 interTTI, LSUB = 3, KTTI=80
−1 interTTI, LSUB = 1, KTTI=160
10
interTTI, LSUB = 3, KTTI=160

−3
10
BLER

−2
10

−4
10
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16
E /N [dB] −3
b 0
10

Fig. 3. BER vs Eb /N0 . Terminal speed = 30kph.

−4
10
0
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16
10 Eb/N0 [dB]
NO interTTI
interTTI, L = 1, K =4
SUB TTI
interTTI, LSUB = 3, KTTI=4
interTTI, LSUB = 1, KTTI=8 Fig. 6. BLER vs Eb /N0 . Terminal speed = 3kph.
interTTI, L = 3, K =8
SUB TTI
−1 interTTI, LSUB = 1, KTTI=16
10
interTTI, LSUB = 3, KTTI=16

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work was supported in part by the ESA project ”Study of
BLER

−2
10
Satellite Role in 4G Mobile Networks”, AO/1-5115/05/NL/US.

−3
R EFERENCES
10

[1] “3rd Generation Partnership Project; Technical Specification Group Radio

−4
10
0 2 4 6 8 10
E /N [dB]
b 0
Fig. 4. BLER vs Eb /N0 . Terminal speed = 30kph.
VI. C ONCLUSIONS
In this work, we propose a novel inter-TTI technique based
on a existing terrestrial physical layer standard, which can be
successfully used to improve the performance of the terrestrial
physical layer when applied to transmission over satellite links.
Satisfactory results have been shown, demonstrating how it
is possible to break channel correlation and aid the conver-
gence of the decoding algorithm. Performance improvement
is greatly dependent on the considered parameters, while
complexity can be traded off with data rate to achieve the
best solution for the considered system.
Access Network; Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA);
Physical Channels and Modulation (Release 8) ”, 3GPP TS 36.211 V8.1.0
(2007-11).
12 14 16
[2] “3rd Generation Partnership Project; Technical Specification Group Radio
Access Network; Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA);
Multiplexing and channel coding (Release 8)”, 3GPP TS 36.212 V8.1.0
(2007-11).
[3] Motorola, “3GPP TSG-RAN WG1 #48 − bis, Parameters for turbo rate-
matching in LTE”, St. Julian’s, Malta, March 26th-30th, 2007.
[4] M. Neri, P. Salmi, and G. E. Corazza, “Fractional Predistortion Tech-
niques with Robust Modulation Schemes for Fixed and Mobile Broadcast-
ing,” 13th IST Mobile and Wireless Communications Summit (IST2004).
[5] “Mobile Applications and sErvices based on Satellite and Terrestrial
interwOrking (IST-2002-507023)”, EC FP6 MAESTRO project.
[6] G. E. Corazza, A. Vanelli-Coralli, and M. Neri, “Mobile Satellite Chan-
nels: Statistical Models and Performance Analysis”, invited paper for the
book ”Signal Processing for Mobile Communications Handbook”, CRC
press, pp-4-1-4-35.
[7] M. Berdondini, M. Neri, and G. E. Corazza, “Adaptive Fractional Pre-
distortion Techniques for Satellite Systems based on Neural Networks
and Tables”, Proceedings of IEEE 65th Vehicular Technology Conference,
VTC SPRING 2007, pp.1400-1404.

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