• Table of contents
• 7. Conclusion and Recommendations
  • 7.1 Conclusions
  • 7.2 Futher Improvements
    • 7.2.1 Synchronization
    • 7.2.2 DVB-S2 compliant

7. Conclusion and Recommendations¶

7.1 Conclusions¶

LabView Communications is a good tool for this type of work, it has features specific for communication chains. Nevertheless, considering that it is still new, in comparison with other versions of NI the best support to have is from the NI forum (opened less than a year ago). It is still recommended to have LabView, since some examples found on the internet can be applied on LabView Communications Design Suite, but are built on LabView.
USRPs, they're good and easy to use, programmable (features), but beware of synchronization issues, and depending on the USRP version they can be easily or harder to synchronize.
Coding does effectively improve communications, as seen on the graphs coding is not hard to implement, however LDPC coding in comparison with Reed-Solomon, BCH or convolutional coding is a little harder to grasp, having to calculate likelihoods for decoding which can add complexity to the simulation.

7.2 Futher Improvements¶

7.2.1 Synchronization¶

In the context of evaluating a satellite communication chain over USRP this project has to provide synchronization between the Transmitter and the Receiver. For a very promising designing software tool like LabVIEW Communications we managed to implement the Transmission providing modulation, filtering, coding and the implementation of an AWGN channel and accordingly for the Receiver, demodulation, matched filtering and decoding. Although synchronization is not an easy task we would have liked to accomplish that. However this project will be shared among the LabVIEW Community and uploaded in the official NI LabVIEW Communications System Design Suite Support http://www.ni.com/examples/ for further academic research, improvements and hopefully a synchronized version over the USRPs.

7.2.2 DVB-S2 compliant¶

The DVB-S2 standard includes many features which were not implemented in the context of this simulation. For example in Forward Error Correction the standard uses an Interleaver to scatter burst errors. The improvements in the $BER$ due to the Interleaver could complement our work.