Reliable Satellite Communications for a Specular Multipath Channel

In many mobile satellite communication systems specular multipath exists and acts as a distortion to the transmitted message stream. In most cases there is a singular specular return which can be characterized by a delay and reflection coefficient. If this return is viewed as intersymbol interference on the channel, then it is possible to consider the resulting channel as modeled by a finite state machine and process the received data stream optimally using the Viterbi algorithm. This paper develops such a scheme and derives a performance bound. A suboptimum scheme is also developed which is less sensitive to inaccurate knowledge of the multipath parameters. Performance bounds for the suboptimum scheme are also developed.