Analysis of M-ary phase-shift keying with diversity reception for land-mobile satellite channels

An analytical technique well suited to numerical analysis is presented for computing the average bit-error rate (BER) and outage probability of M-ary phase-shift keying (PSK) in the land-mobile satellite channel (LMSC) with microdiversity reception. Closed-form expressions are found for L-branch microdiversity using both selection diversity combining (SDC) and maximal ratio combining (MRC). These expressions are extended to include both M-ary coherent PSK (M-PSK) and differential PSK [M-differential PSK (DPSK)]. Following previous empirical studies, the LMSC is modeled as a weighted sum of Rice and Suzuki distributions. Numerical results are provided illustrating the achievable performance of both M-PSK and M-DPSK with diversity reception. Using measured channel parameters, the performance in various mobile environments for various satellite elevation angles is also found.