Performance of DS/CDMA systems with differential M-ary orthogonal modulation and RS-coding for LEO satellite communications

This paper presents a coded modulation scheme based on M-ary orthogonal modulation by means of Walsh–Hadamard (WH) sequences, suitable for low-earth-orbit (LEO) direct sequence/code division multiple access (DS/CDMA) satellite communication systems. Based on the IS-95 scheme, we consider Reed–Solomon (RS)-coded M-ary orthogonal modulation with error or erasures decoding, which presents good performance enhancement with low complexity. LEO satellite links are characterized by large Doppler frequency shifts caused by the difference in velocity between the satellite and the earth mobile terminal, which make conventional non-coherent detection ineffective. In order to overcome the phase shift variations during the symbol period, which result in orthogonality loss of the WH sequences, we applied a differential encoding process to the spreading sequences or the WH chips prior to transmission. A special diversity process suitable for the environment under consideration is also applied. Simulation results show that the proposed diversity/coding/modulation scheme attains very good performance at low transmitter/receiver complexity.  1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.