Suitability of turbo coded OFDM for LEO satellite channels in global mobile communications

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a robust transmission technique in Rayleigh and Rician fading environments. In this paper, turbo coding (TC) is considered with OFDM for a low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite channel. The bit error rate (BER) performance of turbo coded OFDM (TC-OFDM) for different modulation schemes are considered. Results are compared with trellis code modulated OFDM (TCM-OFDM) and convolutional coded OFDM (CC-OFDM). The results show that turbo coded OFDM gives the best performance compared to the TCM-OFDM and CC-OFDM for all modulation schemes considered.