CDMA2000 for a satellite environment

CDMA2000 is the American telecommunication standard for 3G. It is a wideband spread spectrum radio interface designed to provide high data rates and multimedia services to the wireless user. It has two modes of operation, 1X (DS-CDMA) and 3X (MC-CDMA). In this paper, we compare the forward link performance of the two modes for a satellite environment. In order to focus our comparison on the transmission technology (DS-CDMA, MC-CDMA), two services with similar data rates and the same coding scheme, are studied.