Cutoff rates of multichannel MFSK and DPSK signals in mobilesatellite communications

This paper studies the coded performance of multichannel MFSK and DPSK signalings in mobile satellite environments characterized by various kinds of multipath fading. Rician, Rician/lognormal, and a convex combination of Rician and Rician/lognormal or Rayleigh/lognormal distributions are used to model these communication channels. We investigate the minimum average signal-energy-to-noise ratio required to yield a cutoff rate that is greater than or equal to a given code rate. Also examined are system design issues such as the effect of quantization and metric conversion, the choice between binary codes and M-ary symbol codes, the optimization of the diversity order and the signal size, and the order of deinterleaving and diversity combining. Numerical examples are given to answer concerns raised by these issues