EARTH-SKY LINK QUALITY PERFORMANCE FOR FIXED AND MOBILE SCENARIOS IN TROPICAL REGIONS

Recent advances in satellite communication technologies in the tropical regions have led to significant increase in the demand for services and applications that require high channel quality for fixed and mobile satellite terminals. Due to lack of reliable investigations regarding accurate performance evaluation, experiments, and analysis on the satellite communication link in tropical regions under atmospheric impairments for both scenarios, accurate signal quality performance analysis is necessary. This paper presents the link characteristics observations and performance analysis with propagation measurements done in tropical region to provide an accurate database regarding rain attenuation in the tropics for fixed and mobile scenarios. The paper also presents a newly developed extension attached to the measurements setup for improved packet error rate (PER) performance evaluation related to the degradations occur in channel quality for different types of impairments (rain, mobility, and physical obstacles) for 4 modulation schemes, namely QPSK, 8-PSK, 16-QAM and 32-QAM. The results show that the rain impairments at Ku band cause up to 12.5 dB and 23 dB at 77.5° and 40.1° elevation angles respectively in two tropical regions inside Malaysia for fixed scenario with a significant increase in PER at higher M-ary modulation schemes. For mobile scenario the PER appeared at higher M-ary scheme due to the lower signal power degradation in which, in turn, exceeded 1 dB when the vehicle speed exceed 100 km/hr at clear sky. The obstacles at the satellite communication link are shown to have significant effect on the power and PER received by satellite terminal especially at higher M-ary modulation schemes.