Study on cell error rate of a satellite ATM system based on CDMA

In this paper, the cell error rate (CER) of a CDMA-based satellite ATM system is analyzed. Two fading models, i.e. the partial fading model and the total fading model are presented according to multi-path propagation fading and shadow effect. Based on the total shadow model, the relation of CER vs. the number of subscribers at various elevations under 2D-RAKE receiving and non-diversity receiving is got. The impact on cell error rate with pseudo noise (PN) code length is also considered. The result that the maximum likelihood combination of multi-path signal would not improve the system performance when multiple access interference (MAI) is small, on the contrary the performance may be even worse is abtained.