Markovian channel modeling for DVB-RCS satellite systems based on observation window concept

The utilization of the Return Channel Satellite (RCS) in DVB systems allows a bi-directional communication via satellite. With this particular characteristic, DVB-RCS systems promoted its enormous diffusion in the commercial area and the academic research interest and, in this context, it is very important to test DVB-RCS systems using an efficient satellite channel model. Many channel models have been proposed in the literature, but most of them work at the bit level or they investigate only some aspects of channel interaction. In this paper we present a high level satellite channel model based on Markov Chains (MCs) modeling, useful in every simulation context: the proposed Markovian Satellite Channel Model (MSCM) is based on the concept of windowed observations and the idea is not to analyze a single packet, but fixing an observation window to evaluate the degradation level of the link, computing the PER associated to the specific window. The model has been verified through a deep campaign of simulations, which demonstrate how the introduced error is minimized. © 2013 IEEE.