Impact of tropospheric scintillation on direct-sequence spread-spectrum satellite communication networks

Tropospheric scintillation can seriously affect satellite links operating at the K/sub a/-band (20/30 GHz). The average bit error probability for a multiuser binary direct-sequence spread-spectrum satellite communication network operating under amplitude scintillation is evaluated. Numerical results are presented to illustrate performance comparisons of systems operating under typical scintillation statistics. As in the single user case, it is shown that the average system performance gradually degrades as the scintillation intensity increases and is worse for a high variability of these events. The results also indicate that the impact of amplitude tropospheric scintillations becomes less important as the number of asynchronous active users increases.