Ageneralstatisticalchannelmodelformobilesatellitesystems.PDFVIP

744 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 49, NO. 3, MAY 2000 A General Statistical Channel Model for Mobile Satellite Systems Yongjun Xie and Yuguang Fang, Senior Member, IEEE Abstract—In order to guarantee the service quality and relia- upon the use of LEO and medium earth orbiting (MEO) sys- bility for mobile satellite communication systems, we have to take tems. These LEO and MEO systems have several advantages into account outages due to obstruction of the line-of-sight path be- over geosynchronous systems. The most significant advantages tween a satellite and a mobile terminal as well as the signal fluctu- ation caused by interference from multipath radio waves. Thus, we are: 1) the reduction in range provides a large decrease in path need a good characterization for the satellite propagation channel. loss resulting in much small receiving antennas and 2) the re- In this paper, we derive a general statistical model for mobile com- duction in range provides a significant reduction in propagation munication systems based on propagation scattering theory. Both delay making voice conversation more pleasing to the user and the probability density function (pdf) of the received signal enve- increasing the throughput of most data communication proto- lope and that of received signal power are given. This model is shown to be more general than previously known statistical models cols. These systems can and will serve mobile and portable users and can provide a better fit to the experimental data. This new with small near omniantennas. However, the use of the small an- model will play a significant role in the design of mobile satellite tennas as well as the motion of the transmitter and the receiver communication systems. introduces the possibility of multipath and path blockage into Index Terms—Channel m