Performance analysis of a W-CDMA based land mobile satellite communication system with diversity combining over fading channels

We derive the average bit error rate (BER) of a wideband DS-CDMA, land mobile LEO satellite communication system with an equal-gain RAKE receiver. We consider an urban channel model, which is a combination of a narrowband model and a wideband tapped delay line model. A computational simple and efficient approach is presented in this paper for obtaining approximated average BER, which takes advantage of moment parameters of path gain random variables with Rayleigh distributions. The analytical results with BPSK modulation, validated by simulation, are provided to illustrate the achievable performance with both diversity and no diversity reception for various satellite elevation angles.