OSTBC Transmission in Shadowed-Rician Land Mobile Satellite Links

Abstract

In this paper, we study the transmission of orthogonal space–time block codes (OSTBCs) over a shadowed Rician (SR) land mobile satellite (LMS) link. Specifically, we derive the symbol error rate (SER), diversity order, and the average capacity of the OSTBC-transmission-based scheme over the SR fading LMS communication systems. First, we consider the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) SR fading channels and derive the expressions of moment-generating function (mgf) in terms of the Meijer-G function. By substituting the Meijer-G function in terms of hypergeometric function and then by considering the asymptotic approximation of hypergeometric function, the analytical diversity order of the scheme is obtained. The ergodic capacity of the scheme is derived by using the mgf-based approach. The effect of elevation angles over the SER performance of the scheme is analyzed, and it is observed that the performance of the system is improved with increasing values of elevation angles. Next, we consider the OSTBC transmission over correlated SR fading channels and derive the expressions of mgf, SER, diversity order, and average capacity of the considered setup. In particular, it is demonstrated in this paper that, by employing an additional transmit antenna at the satellite along with Alamouti code, the error rate of the LMS communication system can be significantly improved. It is also shown that the correlation has no impact on the diversity order of the system, but it adversely affects the capacity of the system.