Performance of LDPC Codes for Satellite
Communication in Ka Band
Da Xinyu
Telecommunication Engineering Institute of Air Force
Engineering University
Xi’an(710077),China
e-mail: daxinyu@vip.sina.com
Abstract—This paper presents the application of Low-Density
Parity-Check (LDPC) codes in Ka band. Considering the weather
impairments and multi-path fading in Ka band, the channel
model and system model have been found. We analyzed the Bit
error rate (BER) performance of LDPC codes compared with
convolutional code (CC) and uncode at 16QAM and BPSK
modulation technique. The results show that LDPC codes give
the best performance. In the case of 16QAM or BPSK, LDPC
codes can provide 2.5dB or 2.6dB coding gain compared with CC
at a BER of 10-3, and LDPC codes can provide 2.9dB coding gain
compared with CC at a BER of 10-4. It is show that LDPC codes
in Ka band are effective and feasible.
Keywords- Satellite Communication; Ka Band; LDPC
I. INTRODUCTION
With the increasing requirements of satellite
communications and the development of new technology, it is
anticipated that future satellite communications systems with
on board signal processing will be developed as Ka-band
(20/30GHz). However, the propagation of Ka-band is more
susceptible to weather impairments and shadowing than lower
frequencies bands[1] such as Ku band and C band. In Ka band
satellite channel, rain fading and shadowing are main factors
which deteriorate system performance, the loss of radio signal
or attenuation due to rain can degrade the reliability and
performance of satellite links[2]. To meet these problems, an
efficient encoding is required for high data rate transmission. In
this paper we attempt to use LDPC codes in the KA-band.
Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes were first
discovered by Gallager, but no many people given an attention
at that time. When the excellent performance achievable with
iterative decoding schemes became clear to the coding
community, they were rediscovered in the nineties.
(n, k ) linear block codes where n is the
LDPC codes are
transmitted block length and k is the source block length.
From the parity-check matrix H , LDPC codes are classified
into regular LDPC codes and irregular LDPC codes, regular
LDPC having a uniform row weight and column weight, each
row of H contains of ρ ones and each column of H
contains of λ ones, if not all the rows and columns of the H
have the same number of ones, LDPC codes are called to be
978-1-4244-3693-4/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE
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Wang Yanling, Xie Tiecheng
Telecommunication Engineering Institute of Air Force
Engineering University
Xi’an(710077),China
e-mail: wylagxl@163.com
irregular. Compared with the length n of the code and the
number of rows in H , both ρ and λ are small.
Since ρ and λ are small, H has a small density of “ones”
and hence is a sparse matrix. For this reason, the codes
specified by H are called LDPC codes[3].
LDPC codes have a remarkable performance with iterative
decoding that is very close to the Shannon limit. When
compared to the decoding algorithm of convolutional code,
LDPC decoding algorithm has more parallelization, low
implementation complexity, low decoding latency, as well as
no error-floors at high SNR. Consequently, LDPC codes have
become strong competitors to convolutional code for error
control in many communication and digital storage systems
where high reliability is required.
In this paper, we try to adopt the LDPC codes to reduce the
effect of rain attenuation or fading in Ka band satellite channel.
Section 2 gives the overview of LDPC codes, in section 3, the
considered channel and system model is presented and
discussed, in section 4, we compare the LDPC codes with
convolutional code and uncode in Ka band satellite
communication channel, from the simulation results, we can
conclude in section 5 that the performance of LDPC codes
have best performance than convolutional code and uncode.
II. LDPC CODES
In the following we will give an overview of LDPC codes.
Any ( n, k ) linear block code can be graphically represented by
a bipartite graph like Tanner graph. An example of a Tanner
graph describing a simple LDPC code is shown in Fig. 1, the
parity-check matrix H is:
⎡1 1 1 0 1 0 0⎤ c1 + c2 + c3 + c5 = 0
H = ⎢⎢0 1 1 1 0 1 0⎥⎥ → c2 + c3 + c4 + c6 = 0 (1)
⎢⎣1 1 0 1 0 0 1⎥⎦ c1 + c2 + c4 + c7 = 0
G
Where the C = ( c1 , c2 , c3 , c4 , c5 , c6 , c7 ) , and it satisfied
GT G
for H ⋅ C = 0 . From the Tanner graph we can see that the
nodes be divided into two disjoint subsets such that each edge
can connect only two nodes belonging to different subsets. We
define U b = (b1 , b2 ,", b7 ) to be the variable nodes, III. CHANNEL AND SYSTEM MODEL

and U c = (c1 , c2 , c3 ) to be the check nodes. A. Channel model

For Ka band communication, the atmosphere layer will
cause signals extra attenuation [4] which is not only function of
frequency, but also function of location, elevation and system
availability.
Suppose a digital modulated signal s (t ) is transmitted
over the channel

s (t ) = Re [ s′(t ) exp( j 2π f c t )] (4)

Figure 1. Tanner graph for parity-check matrix H
Where s′(t ) is the equivalent lowpass transmitted signal,
We define m = n − k to be the number of parity checks then the equivalent lowpass received signal may be expressed
in terms of the frequency domain as
in the code. Supposing to index the variable nodes from 1 to
n and the check nodes from 1 to m , the j − th variable node ∞

will be connected to the i − th check node if and only if a '1' r (t ) = ∫ C ( f , t ) S ′( f ) exp( j 2πf c t )df + n(t ) (5)
−∞
is present in the parity-check matrix H in position (i, j ) . In
a Tanner graph, the degree of a node is defined as the number
S ′( f ) is frequency content of s′(t ) , n(t ) is
Where
of edges connected to that node, it is that a node has d degree if the AWGN of the Ka band, C ( f , t ) is the channel
it has branches d departing from it, so in regular LDPC codes time-variant transfer function. As Ka band satellite
communication channel is a slow frequency nonselective
all the variable nodes have the same degree d v and all the fading channel within the band, we can regard the transfer
check nodes have the same degree d c , but in irregular LDPC function C ( f , t ) as a complex-valued constant during at
codes variable and check nodes are characterized by degrees least one symbol interval. Let C ( f , t ) = A exp( jφ ) [5], then
varying according to some distribution. we have
The degree distributions of an LDPC code are ∞

∫ A exp( jφ )S ′( f ) exp( j 2π f t )df + n(t )

dv
r (t ) =
polynomials denoted as λ ( x) = ∑ λi x i −1 −∞
c
(6)
i =2
dc = A exp( jφ ) s′(t ) + n(t ) 0 ≤ t ≤ Ts
and ρ ( x ) = ∑ ρi x i−1 , where λi and ρi correspond to the It shows that the received signal is simply the transmitted
i =2 signal multiplied by a complex-valued constant C ( f , t ) .
fraction of branches in the graph connected to degree- d v
C ( f , t ) = A exp( jφ ) is called a multiplicative fading
variable nodes and degree- d c check nodes. The coefficients process. A and φ represent the envelope and the phase of the
λi and ρi must satisfy the following constraints[3]: equivalent lowpass channel respectively. Both of them are
random processes. The latest research shows: Ka band satellite
∞ ∞ communication channel characteristics are mainly affected by
∑ λi = 1
i =1
∑ρ
i =1
i =1 0 ≤ λi , ρ i ≤ 1 (2) weather conditions. The signal envelope and signal phase
caused by weather conditions can be modeled as Gaussian
random processes. The probability density function of its
The following linear constraint must be satisfied for a degree envelope is given by
distribution in order to be compatible with a given code rate R :
1 p( A) = (
1
[
) exp − ( A − m) 2 / 2σ 2 ] (7)
R=
n−m
=1−
∫ ρ ( x)dx
0
(3)
2πσ
1
n
∫ λ ( x)dx
0

Moreover, we will denote by C = (λ , ρ ) , the ensemble

n

of all irregular LDPC codes with the same edge degree

distribution pair (λ , ρ ) and the same codeword length
n .The analogue regular ensemble will be denoted
n
by C = (d v , d c ) .

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 TABLE I. KA BAND SATELLITE CHANNEL ENVELOPE MODELS B. System model
Weather conditions m σ2 We show the basic transmitter and receiver structure used
0.458 0.00055
for Ka band system[6] in Fig. 3.
sunshine
thunder shower 0.347 0.00273
light snow 0.499 0. 00022
icy water 0.481 0.00061
As can be seen from Table 1, different weather conditions, ˆ ˆ + Zˆ
M c = WZ 1 2

the random fluctuations of the signal envelope and signal phase C (t )

F (t )
are different. Hereby, we can set up the statistic model for Ka
band satellite channel[6] show in Fig. 2.
n(t )

C (t )
s(t ) r (t )

ˆ ˆ + Zˆ
M c = WZ 1 2
F (t ) n(t ) Figure 3. Block diagram of the LDPC coded Ka band system

Figure 2. Ka band satellite channel model
In this model, M c is the attenuation which caused by the
mobile factors, F (t ) is the attenuation which caused by the
fixed-link, n(t ) is the additive noise of the channel.
Therefore, the C (t ) which is the multiplicative interference
factor of channel composed from the F (t ) and M c .
Because the multi-path fading and the fading which caused
by the shadow have different characteristics, the former is fast
fading while the later is slowly fading. So, the interference
factor can be composed of two aspects.
First, the multi-path fading can be expressed as a Gaussian
random process
Wˆ (t ) = W (t ) exp( jφ1 ) (8)
Secondly, the shadow effect can also be expressed as a
random process
Zˆ (t ) = Z (t ) exp( jφ2 ) (9)
Where Z (t ) is the envelope obey the lognormal
distribution, so, the parameters U = ln Z can be expressed
as a Gaussian distribution.
The multiplicative interference factor
generally expressed as
ˆ ˆ + Zˆ
M c = WZ
1 2
Where Ẑ1 is the shadow effect at the direction of the
multi-path while Ẑ 2 at the propagation direction of the line
of sight
At the transmitter, binary information data are encoded
using the LDPC encoder. The coded data are mapped to the
modulation. The complex data are then passed through a
serial-to-parallel (S/P) converter and modulated by using
inverse Fast Fourier Transform (IFFT). The data are spread
over both time and frequency domains. The system can hence
take full advantage of the time and frequency diversity of the
channel.
At the receiver, FFT is performed on the received data. The
received data are then converted by the parallel-to-serial (P/S)
converter and passed through the demodulation. Finally, the
received data are decoded using the LDPC decoder.
IV. SIMULATION RESULTS
We use (900, 3, 6), (1800, 3, 6) LDPC codes and 1/2 code
rate; Transmission Bit rate: 3.125 Mbits/s, Carrier Frequency
(round Segment): 29.2 GHz; Signal Power (Signal to noise
ratio (SNR) is defined at the output of the IFFT processor. It
should be noted that, the effect the guard interval has not been
considered. Apart from that, perfect synchronization and
perfect channel estimation have also been assumed at the
receiver.
From the simulation results in Fig. 4~5, we can see that in
the case of 16QAM, LDPC codes can provide 2.5dB coding
gain compared with CC and 4.8dB coding gain compared with
uncode at a BER of 10-3, and in the case of BPSK, LDPC codes
M c can be can provide 2.6dB coding gain compared with CC and 4.5dB
coding gain compared with uncode at a BER of 10-3, at a BER
of 10-4, LDPC codes also can provide 2.5dB coding gain
compared with CC both in the case of 16QAM and BPSK. So,
(10) we can conclude that LDPC codes give the best performance in
KA band compared with CC and uncode. It should also be
noticed that LDPC codes has the highest BER slope at high
SNR values compared to convolutional coding for all
modulation schemes considered.

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 0
REFERENCES
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Uncode [1] Wenzhen Li, Choi Look LaW, J.Tong and V.Dubey. Ka-band Land
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[3] Michele Franceschini,Gianluigi Ferrari,Riccardo Raheli and Aldo
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[4] C. Komninakis and R. D. Wesel. Joint Iterative channel estimation and
decoding in flat correlated rayleigh fading. IEEE Jour. Selected Area in
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Communications. 2001, 19(9): 1706-1717.
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8 9 10 11 12
SNB(dB)
13 14 15 16
[5] WNG Ai-hua, WANG Chun-ting. Performance Analysis and Simulation
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Communication. Journal of Being Institute of Technology, 2003,
Figure 4. BER comparison under 16QAM modulation
Vol.12.pp 75-80.
[6] Da Xin-yu, Xiang Jing-lin and Zhu Hai-feng. Performance of
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Uncode Band.WICOM2008.978-1-4244-2108-4. 2008 IEEE.
CC
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10 LDPC

-2
10

-3
10
BER

-4
10

-5
10

-6
10

-7
10
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
SNB(dB)

Figure 5. BER comparison under BPSK modulation

TABLE II. COMPARISON OF LDPC CODES VS CC AND LDPC VS

UNCODE
Coding Coding Coding
Modulation
Comparison Gain Gain Gain
Scheme
At 10-2 At 10-3 At 10-4
Uncode 3dB 4.8dB 5.6dB
16QAM
CC 1.8dB 2.5dB 2.9dB
Uncode 2.5dB 4.5dB 5.3dB
BPSK
CC 2.0dB 2.6dB 2.9dB

V. CONCLUSION
The performance of LDPC codes was analyzed and
simulated in Ka band satellite communication channel. Results
show that LDPC codes give the best performance compared to
the other two coding schemes (CC and uncode), it can reduce
the bit error rate and provide more coding gain.
The results in this paper can be applied to Ka-band satellite
communication systems. Even though the simulation results are
limited to Ka-band satellites, it can be extended with slight
modifications for other systems such as terrestrial
communications, geostationary satellite and also for any other
mobile links.

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