Citation
Abstract
At very low signal-to-noise ratios such as those that Voyager 2 will encounter at Uranus, the performance of the Reed-Solomon| Viterbi concatenated coding system could be seriously degraded by loss of node synchronization by the Viterbi decoder. In this article we will describe this problem and show that it can be almost completely avoided with a simple outboard hardware “node synchronizer,” This device makes statistical decisions about node syne based on the hard-quantized undecoded data stream. We show that in a worst-case Voyager-like environment, our method will detect and correct a true loss of node sync (thought to be a very rate event) within several hundred bits, many of these outages will be corrected by the RS code, At the same time, the mean time between false alarms for our technique is on the order of several years.
Details
- Volume
- 42-73
- Published
- May 15, 1983
- Pages
- 22–35
- File Size
- 957.7 KB