Diversity reception for blockage mitigation in EHF land mobile satellite communications systems

Due to severe signal shadowing caused by objects in the propagation path, EHF land mobile satellite communications systems are characterized by intermittent links. One approach to overcoming this so-called signal blockage problem is to employ diversity reception. Two approaches to diversity reception, one temporal and one spatial, are considered in this work. The performance of the schemes are characterized analytically in terms of outage probability reduction and resource efficiency gains. Moreover, the effects of correlation among the diversity channels are also quantified. Analysis results indicate that only a few uncorrelated diversity channels are required to achieve significant improvements. When the diversity channels are correlated, more channels are necessary to achieve similar gains.