Performance of an OFDM/QAM system in a medium earth orbit satellite link

In this paper, performance of a turbo-coded OFDM system is analyzed and simulated in a earth orbit satellite link. The performance is evaluated in terms of bit error probability. The satellite link is modeled as a combination of Rayeigh fading with shadowing and Rician fading channels. From simulation results, it is demonstrated that Max-Log-MAP algorithm is promising in terms of performance and complexity. It is shown that performance is substantially improved by increasing the number of iterations and interleaver length of a turbo encoder. The results in this paper can be applied to OFDM-based satellite communication systems.