Enhancing free space optical CubeSat (FSOCS) communication links using low-complexity LDPC decoding techniques

In this work, a low-complexity, low-power, LDPC decoding scheme is presented to improve the performance of Free-Space Optical CubeSat (FSOCS) communication links. This hard-decision bit-flipping scheme aims to improve the performance-complexity tradeoff compared to existing LDPC decoding techniques. Our simulations, which span a wide variety of FSOCS channel models including inter-satellite links and atmospheric optical channels, demonstrate that the proposed decoder approaches the performance of the soft-decision Min-Sum decoder while requiring fewer iterations compared to state-of-the-art hard-decoding schemes. The reduced computational complexity and decoding time make it suitable for resource-constrained CubeSat platforms.