Performance of a CDMA-based satellite communication system with phase noise

In this paper, the impact of phase noise on a CDMA-based satellite communication system is analyzed and simulated. The satellite channel is modeled as combination of Rician fading and shadowed Rayleigh fading channels. The nonlinear Fokker-Planck method is employed to analyze the first-order PLL (phase locked loop) performance. Phase noise is modeled as Tikhonov distribution. The performance is evaluated in terms of bit error probability. The simulation results for BER performance with phase noise are shown in terms of many system parameters such as SNR, the number of users in a beam, and standard deviation of shadowing. From simulation results, it is concluded that the phase noise substantially degrades system performance of the CDMA-based satellite system. This can be interpreted that detection loss (decrease of SNR) due to phase noise leads to degradation of system performance. The considerations in this paper can be applied to a satellite link design for a CDMA-based satellite system.