Proceedings of the Third International Mobile Satellite Conference (IMSC 1993)

Satellite-based mobile communications systems provide voice and data communications to users over a vast geographic area. The users may communicate via mobile or hand-held terminals, which may also provide access to terrestrial cellular communications services. While the first and second International Mobile Satellite Conferences (IMSC) mostly concentrated on technical advances, this Third IMSC also focuses on the increasing worldwide commercial activities in Mobile Satellite Services. Because of the large service areas provided by such systems, it is important to consider political and regulatory issues in addition to technical and user requirements issues. Topics covered include: the direct broadcast of audio programming from satellites; spacecraft technology; regulatory and policy considerations; advanced system concepts and analysis; propagation; and user requirements and applications

Band sharing and satellite diversity techniques for CDMA.

High levels of interference between satellite constellation systems, fading and shadowing are a major problem for the successful performance of communication systems using the allocated L/S frequency bands for Non-Geostationary Earth Orbit (NGEO) satellites. As free spectrum is nonexistent, new systems wishing to operate in this band must co-exist with other users, both satellite and terrestrial. This research is mainly concerned with two subjects. Firstly, band sharing between different systems Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) and Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) has been evaluated for maximizing capacity and optimising efficiency of using the spectrum available. For the case of widened channel bandwidth of the CDMA channel, the overlapping was tested under different degrees of channel overlap and different orders of filters. The best result shows that at the optimum degree of channel overlap, capacity increases by up to 21%. For the case of fixed channel bandwidth, the optimum overlapping between CDMA systems depends on the filtering Roll-off factor and achieves an improvement of the spectrum efficiency of up to 13.4%. Also, for a number of narrowband signal users sharing a CDMA channel, the best location of narrowband signals to share spectrum with a CDMA system was found to be at the edge of the CDMA channel. Simulation models have been constructed and developed which show the combination of DS- CDMA techniques, forward error correction (FEC) code techniques and satellite diversity with Rake receiver for improving performance of interference, fading and shadowing under different environments. Voice activity factor has been considered to reduce the effect of multiple access interference (MAI). The results have shown that satellite diversity has a significant effect on the system performance and satellite diversity gain achieves an improvement up to 6dB. Further improvements have been achieved by including concatenated codes to provide different BER for different services. Sharing the frequency band between a number of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellation systems is feasible and very useful but only for a limited number of LEOS satellite CDMA based constellations. Furthermore, satellite diversity is an essential factor to achieve a satisfactory level of service availability, especially for urban and suburban environments