Abstract
An improved time diversity technique is proposed for deploying the 3GPP LTE air-interface over satellite mobile links. It overcomes the FEC performance loss resulting from the use of a short transmit-time-interval (TTI) in LTE. By using transport block expansion, code block segmentation, advanced rate matching and automatic retransmissions, the FEC coded block is split over as many TTIs as is necessary to break the channel correlation without any reduction in the user data rate.