Multi-h CPM with post-detection diversity in satellite mobile fading channels

The increasing number of users of mobile communication systems and the corresponding need for increased capacity show the importance of using a modulation scheme which is both power and spectrally efficient. A comparison between two different multi-h CPM schemes is made for the land mobile satellite communication channel. A dynamic channel model is considered corresponding to different environments and the transitions between these environments. This study is complemented with the use of post-detection diversity in the receiver (implemented by means of two Viterbi receivers) that allows an improved performance, in particular when the received signal is unshadowed. Results show that multi-h CPM can achieve good performance when using receiver diversity both in terms of bit error rate and occupied bandwidth. However, during shadowed time intervals it is necessary to use some form of error control coding, specially for data transmission.