Analysis of a Packet-Level Block Coding Approach for Terrestrial-Satellite Mobile Systems

The high data-rate of terminals together with the demand for anywhere-anytime user connectivity makes the simultaneous use of terrestrial and satellite infrastructures a necessity in mobile scenarios. To achieve a reliable and timely distribution of contents, there are important technical challenges concerning the implementation of multipath communication protocols and robust recovery mechanisms to cope with the signal degradation because of the effects of the mobile fading channel. In this respect, this paper proposes a new technique called path-based network coding to jointly exploit the availability of multiple paths and network coding to maximize the system transmission control protocol (TCP) goodput. An analytical approach allowing a formal optimization based on approximate derivations is proposed, which proves to be in good agreement with simulation results and a more accurate optimization method based on a genetic algorithm.