Effects of imperfect power control on a CDMA system operating over a low Earth orbiting satellite link

The analysis of both performance and capacity of direct sequence CDMA in terrestrial cellular systems has been addressed in the technical literature. It has been suggested that CDMA be used as a multiple access method for satellite systems as well, in particular for multi-spot beam Low Earth Orbit Satellites (LEOS). One is tempted to argue that since CDMA works well on terrestrial links, it will nominally work as well on satellite links. However, because there are fundamental differences in the characteristics of the two channels, such as larger time delays from the mobile to the base station and smaller multipath delay spreads on the satellite channels, the performance of CDMA on satellite links cannot always be predicted accurately from its performance on terrestrial channels. In this paper, the authors analytically derive the performance of a CDMA system which operates over a low Earth orbiting satellite channel. They incorporate such effects as imperfect power control and dual order diversity to obtain the average probability of error of a single user.<>