Enhancing Resilience of Space Communications to Pulsed Jamming through Spatially Coupled Low-Density Parity-Check Codes

It is well known that one of the most dangerous attacks against space transmissions is jamming. In particular, space telemetry downlinks are subject to extremely tight power and bandwidth limitations and are hence vulnerable to both accidental and intentional interference. While the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) has already standardized Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes for the use in space telemetry communications, we show that their performance is significantly deteriorated by the impact of pulsed jamming. We investigate the use of spatially coupled LDPC (SC-LDPC) codes as a promising alternative for improving reliability of telemetry channels in interference-heavy environments. We perform Monte Carlo simulations to assess the sensitivity of SC-LDPC-coded deep space communications to pulsed jamming, comparing attainable error rate performance with an LDPC code recommended in the CCSDS standard for telemetry synchronization and channel coding issues. Our results show that SC-LDPC codes can achieve improved performance, in terms of reduced bit error rate, under different pulsed jamming conditions.