Study on diversity methods in mobile satellite communication systems

Diversity is a good approach to cope with fading and interference, which has widely been used in terrestrial wireless communication systems. Recently, this technique has been taken into account in mobile satellite communication systems. This paper proposes three kinds of diversity methods, named satellite transmitting diversity, phased array multiplex transmitting diversity and multi-beam receiving diversity for downlink and uplink of satellite mobile communication systems, respectively. The bit error rate of the proposed methods with different satellite communication channels is simulated. It is found that the proposed methods can provide significant diversity gain, which may provide some reference for designer of mobile satellite communication systems.