Extending On-The-Fly Network Coding By Interleaving For Avionic Satellite Links

Still today, aircraft disappear and crash without communicating their last position. Looking into details, satellite communications currently seems to be the only reliable way to connect and send data on long-distance flights. However, geo-stationary satellite systems suffer from high propagation delays making Forward Error Correction (FEC) schemes beneficial compared to error handling by retransmissions. In this paper, Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) is proposed as a packet level FEC technique for high delay satellite communication. Using emulation, it is shown that correlated losses typical for a satellite channel result in a high variation in the number of redundant symbols required to decode a generation. This can be improved by using interleaving, which comes by the cost of an increased delay. A novel approach is introduced that combines On-the fly Coding and interleaving. This can significantly reduce the average delay introduced by interleaving and allows to efficiently overcome correlated losses in combination with Network Coding for time-critical applications.