Error control for Ka-band land mobile satellite communications systems

Error control for Ka-band land mobile satellite communications systems is examined. The dominant propagation effect at Ka-band is signal shadowing caused by obstructions in the propagation path. Depending on the mobile speed, shadow events may last for many seconds and will typically result in attenuations at the receiver too severe to be addressed by raw link margin. The performance of forward error correction coding, automatic repeat request protocols, and various combinations of these two strategies are investigated. Both analytical and simulation results are presented.