Satellite diversity in mobile satellite CDMA systems

The paper addresses the exploitation of satellite diversity in a satellite mobile network. In particular, we focus on the impact of diversity on service availability and on system capacity, considering the forward link of a CDMA system with a multisatellite and multibeam architecture. The analysis includes the effects of path blockage, intrabeam and interbeam interference, imperfect power control, and fading correlation in the time-domain due to nonideal interleaving. A closed-form solution is given for the estimation of system capacity. We show that satellite diversity is essential in providing service availability in urban and suburban areas, while the impact of satellite diversity on system capacity may be positive or negative, mainly depending on the fading channel characteristics. In particular, diversity becomes more and more beneficial for increasing fading time-domain correlation (i.e., for low mobile speed and/or limited interleaving depth). The analytical results have been validated by means of Monte Carlo simulation.