Development of a Shorted Interleaved Reed-Solomon Codes (siRS) for data downlink in Stratospheric Probes and Nano-Satellites

Abstract

In the last 10 years, the advancement in the electronics have made possible the development of more sophisticated unmanned vehicles and probes, manufactured using Components-Of-The-Shelf (COTS) available to public, whether be for industrial of scientific purposes. In the matter of aerospace exploration, the CubeSats are the best example of sophisticated devices partially of entirely developed using this commercial COTS. The financial cost of some components is still a point of consideration in the design, but it is not entirely a show-stopper since some low-cost components can be optimized to meet the necessary requirements and increase the reliability. In the case of stratospheric probes and nano-satellites, the Telemetry, Tracking and Command (TT&C) subsystem, in charge of the data uplink/ downlink, can be improved by including an Error Correcting Code (ECC), making possible to use commercial transceivers of low-power are low-cost. In this article we describe an implementation of an interleaved and shortened Reed-Solomon Code, which we called siRS, to improve the image and telemetry downlink in stratospheric probes and nano-satellites, using entirely low-cost commercial RF transceivers and an ARM-based mini-PC.