Successive interference cancellation in a low-earth orbit satellite system

Successive interference cancellation is a promising technique for increasing the capacity of uplink CDMA channels. In this paper, the technique is extended to a low-earth orbit satellite channel. Unlike terrestrial cellular channels, satellite channels typically have a limited multipath profile, but significant closed-loop power control error due to the round-trip delay incurred in communicating with an orbiting satellite. In this paper, a recently developed power control algorithm with considerable robustness to channel estimation and power control error is applied to an architecture capable of multiple-access interference cancellation and multipath combining. Even in the presence of large channel estimation and power control error, it will be shown that performance is increased significantly over previous research on interference cancellation for multipath fading channels, provided that the number of multipath components is small, as is the case for satellite communication systems. In addition, the proposed scheme has a low complexity relative to competing interference cancellation schemes. Copyright # 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.