Mobile Satellite Communications : Channel Characterization and Simulation

Abstract: The channel characterization of a mobile satellite communication which is an important and fast growing arm of wireless communication plays an important role in the transmission of information through a propagation medium from the transmitter to the receiver with minimum barest error rate putting into consideration the channel impairments of different geographical locations like urban, suburban, rural and hilly. The information transmitted from satellite to mobile terminals suffers amplitude attenuation and phase variation which is caused by multipath fading and signal shadowing effects of the environment. These channel impairments are commonly described by three fading phenomena which are Rayleigh fading, Racian fading and Log-normal fading which characterizes signal propagation in different environments. They are mixed in different proportions by different researchers to form a model to describe a particular channel. In the thesis, the general overview of mobile satellite is conducted including the classification of satellite by orbits, the channel impairments, the advantages of mobile satellite communication over terrestrial. Some of the major existing statistical models used in describing different type of channels are looked into and the best out of them which is Lutz model [6] is implemented. By simulating the Lutz model which described all possible type of environments into two states which represent non-shadowed or LOS and shadowed or NLOS conditions, shows that the BER is predominantly affected by shadowing factor