IMPACT OF TROPOSPHERIC SCINTILLATION ON DIRECT-SEQUENCE SPREAD-SPECTRUM SATELLITE COMMUNICATION NETWORKS

Mohamed-Slim Alouini and Paul G. Ste es

School of Electrical and Computer Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0250, USA E-mail: paul.ste es@ee.gatech.edu
Tropospheric scintillation can seriously a ect satellite links operating at Ka -band. The average bit error probability for a multiuser binary direct-sequence spread-spectrum satellite communication network operating under amplitude scintillation is evaluated. Numerical results are presented to illustrate performance comparisons of systems operating under typical scintillation statistics. As in the single user case, it is shown that the average system performance gradually degrades as the scintillation intensity increases and is worse for a high variability of these events. Results also indicate that the impact of amplitude tropospheric scintillations becomes less important as the number of asynchronous active users increases.

ABSTRACT

1. INTRODUCTION
New commercial applications are being promoted for the use of spread-spectrum (SS) techniques for satellite communication systems including: (i) Low- to medium-density tra c for interactive business transactions (credit card veri cations, nancial, and reservations services), (ii) Singlehop, very low response time links for voice, data, and facsimile direct communications, and (iii) Direct broadcasting from satellites (DBS). In the rst application, asynchronous code-division multiple-access (CDMA) allows low-cost very small aperture terminals (VSATs) to communicate with a hub-station through a star network. The second application consists of a CDMA fully meshed network of small personal communications terminals (PCTs) conveying in demand-assignment multiple access (DAMA) fashion. The DBS application uses synchronous code domain multiplexed (CDM) signals to transmit di erent channels from a broadcasting ground station (cable company, satellite company, \sky-music", etc.) to xed and/or mobile VSATs. Although there are two basic forms of SS, frequency hopping (FH) and direct sequence (DS), the latter is more frequently used for satellite communication networks. Additionally, the next generation of geostationary communications satellites will take advantage of operation at Ka-band (20/30 GHz) with its large available bandwidths, and using high gain narrow spot beam antennas that will This work was supported by NASA Lewis Research Center under Contract NAS3-27361.

be able to support smaller user terminals. Unfortunately, atmospheric e ects including rain attenuation and tropospheric amplitude scintillation can seriously a ect the quality of transmission at these high microwave frequencies. The scintillation degradation e ect can even become predominant for low-margin VSAT and PCT systems operating at dry low-elevation sites. Accurate evaluation of the performance of these networks is of interest in planning and designing e cient fading compensation methods such as (i) forward error correction (FEC), and automatic repeat request (ARQ) schemes, and (ii) adaptive modulations and power control techniques. As part of the Advanced Communications Technology Satellite (ACTS) propagation experiments program, the Georgia Institute of Technology has been involved in the Ka-band channel characterization and in the estimation of propagation impairments on the performance of VSATs 1]. Of key interest are experimental and theoretical studies of the impact of scintillation on SS signals. This paper examines the performance of a direct sequence spread-spectrum (DS/SS) satellite communication system subject to tropospheric amplitude scintillation. The following section gives the statistical characterization of scintillation then describes the scintillating channel model. Section 3 presents the DS/SS system model and, the derivation of the average bit error probability (BER). The performance results calculated for speci c scintillation statistics are reported in section 4. The paper concludes with a discussion of the results and directions for future research.

2. SCINTILLATING CHANNEL MODEL

Tropospheric scintillation results from random temporal variations and spatial inhomogeneities in the refractive index along the radio propagation path. It appears as an instability in both the amplitude and the phase of the signal. In this paper, we assume that the scintillation-induced phase jitter is small compared to the jitter generated by satellite and ground station frequency converters. The discussion is therefore limited to the impact of amplitude scintillation. During a typical scintillation event, the received satellite signal amplitude uctuates at a rate of approximately 1/3 Hz for a time period up to about one and a half hour. These events tend to occur in the early afternoon on hot humid summer days, and their e ect is polarization inde-

pendent but is more pronounced at low-elevation angles, higher frequencies, and for small-diameter receiving antennas 2]. Based on the Rytov approximation and Tatarskii's theoretical formulation, one can characterize amplitude scintillations by the logarithmic stochastic process (t) 3]. Due to variations in meteorological conditions on the propagation path, (t) is a stationary zero mean Gaussian process only during short periods of time during which its intensity remains constant. However as the weather conditions change, the refractive index structure parameter varies, inducing an inherent variability in . This causes the scintillation long-term probability density function (pdf) to diverge from the normal distribution. This divergence is especially clear in the tails of the pdf. Since short-term statistics are insu cient for satellite communications system performance evaluations (in term of average BER and link availability), Mousley and Vilar 3] proposed a long term statistical model for (t) that was experimentally validated at the X -band and at the higher Ka -band 3]. According to this model, 2 is itself considered to be a random variable 2 following a log-normal distribution with ln( m ) mean and standard deviation. The parameters m and have to be characterized for a particular site and depend mainly on its climatological conditions, the operating frequency, the receiver antenna diameter and the link elevation angle. This model prescribes the normal pdf for short-term logamplitude uctuations as a conditional pdf, conditioned on the random variable ; the resulting long-term pdf is determined by averaging over the range of . This pdf is the Mousley-Vilar pdf p ( ), and is given by 3]
p

3. PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS
The e ect of amplitude scintillation on the performance of the satellite-earth channel had been initially accommodated by introducing an extra xed degradation in the nominal budget link 4]. A more accurate method of BER evaluation in the presence of scintillation has been suggested by Banjo and Vilar 5]. This method was developed for single receivers using binary PSK modulation. In this section, we extend this method to a multi-user SS satellite communication system operating in a scintillating environment. Assuming a binary DS/SS system such as described by Pursley 6], K users simultaneously share a channel, each transmitting with power P at a common carrier frequency fo = 2 !o , using a data rate R = 1=T and a chip rate Rc = 1=Tc . Each transmitter k (1 k K ) is assigned a k) speci c code sequence (a( j ) of chips elements (+1; ?1), so that its code waveform is given by
ak (t) =
+1 X

j=?1

aj

( )

PTc (t

? jTc )

(3)

The function PT denotes the unit rectangular pulse of durak) tion T . The code sequence (a( j ) is assumed to be periodic with period or processing gain N = T =Tc . The data signal bk (t) is binary PSK modulated onto the carrier at fo then spread by the kth users's code sequence. The resulting kth users's transmitted signal sk (t) is thus given by 2P ak (t) bk (t) cos(!ot + k ) (4) where the phase angle k is a random variable uniformly distributed over 0; 2 ] to take into account that the K users are not phase synchronous. Moreover, for asynchronous DS/CDMA systems, the user k is randomly delayed relative to a reference signal by k modeled as a uniformly distributed independent random variable in the interval 0; T ]. The composite signal stot (t) can then be expressed as
sk (t) = stot (t)=

( )=

Z
0

2 ))2 ? 2 ? (ln( 2 = m exp 2 2 2 2 2

(1)

Taking the mean variance of the Mousley-Vilar pdf the longterm (or average) variance 2 of is related to m and 2 by 2 = m exp( 2 =2). The scintillating communication channel is modeled as an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel a ected by tropospheric amplitude scintillation. At the output of the channel, the scintillating received signal r(t) can therefore be written as
r(t)

K p X k=0

2P ak (t? k )bk (t ? k )cos(!o (t? k )+ k ) (5)

= ro (t) exp( (t)) + n(t)

(2)

where n(t) is the channel AWGN stochastic process with zero mean and two sided spectral density No =2, and ro (t) is the unperturbed \clear sky" signal in which the information is carried. We assume in our analysis that the tropospheric scintillating channel is not frequency selective since its coherence bandwidth is about a few GHz. The channel is also considered to be slowly time varying since the scintillation spectrum has the appearance of a band-limited white noise with a roll-o frequency of about 1/3 Hz. The stochastic process (t) is thus assumed to have the following characteristics: (i) statistically modeled by the Mousley-Vilar distribution, (ii) uncorrelated with the AWGN random process n(t), (iii) constant over the total signal bandwidth, and (iv) remains constant during a bit time T .

However, in case of synchronous transmission, the time delays k are not random and can be set to k = 0 for all users. Our analysis assumes that the channel responds in the same way for all users. This is the case for a VSAT and PCT networks subject to the following scintillation scenarios: Only the down-link is qa ected by scintillations with an average intensity 2 d . Only the up-link q is a ected by scintillations with an average intensity 2 u and for a network supporting transmitters from the same geographical region (i.e., having the same scintillation statistics). This is typically the case for a high gain Ka-band narrow spot beam. Both the up-link and down-link are a ected by scintillations with an estimated overall average intensity

= 2 u + 2 d for a network connecting transmitters in region A to a receiver in region B. A loopedback experimental link (A is the same as B), such as that being used in the Georgia Tech ACTS experiment, can be considered as a particular case of this scenario. For all these scenarios, the received signal r(t) at the output of the channel may be written as r(t) = stot (t) exp ( (t)) + n(t) (6) Let us consider the ith user's receiver and assume that it is correctly synchronized, such as i = i = 0. The decision variable Zi at the output of this matched receiver is
2

K where RK i = k=1;k6=i rk;i is the total interference parameter caused by the other K ? 1 codes on the ith one and Eb = P T is the energy per bit. The ith user's conditional bit error probability (BERi ) for a binary coherent PSK may then be written under the Gaussian approximation as ? BERi ( ) = Q SN Ri ( ) (13) where Q(:) is the Gaussian integral function de ned as
+1 1 Q(x) = p exp(?y2 =2) dy (14) 2 x Integrating (13) over the Mousley-Vilar pdf of the scintillation (1) yields the user i's average BER

Zi

Z T
0

r(t) ai (t) cos(!o t) dt

(7)

< BERi >=

By assuming slow scintillation, P 1 and by writing the data signal waveform as bi (t) = + j=?1 bi;j PT (t ? jT ), Zi is found to be equal to
r
Zi

2 exp( ) bi;0 + I ] +
T

Z T
0

n(t)ai (t)cos(!ot)dt

(8)

where I is the multiple access interference term (MAI) dened in 6] as a function of the discrete aperiodic crosscorrelation function. Under the standard Gaussian approximation (large number of users and high processing gain, i.e., K 10 and N 200) the MAI is modeled by a zeromean normal distribution. Thus, Zi may be considered to be a conditionally Gaussian random variable (conditioned on ) so that
E Zi=

We may note that when there is no scintillation ( = 0), then < BERi >= Q( SN Ri (0) ), and the probability of error reduces to the the expression derived by Pursley in a scintillation free channel 6]. In the same way, neglecting the multi-user's interference term in (15) yields the same expression for the average BER as the one computed in 5] for a single-user coherent binary PSK satellite digital link subject to scintillations and given by
< BER >=

?1

SN Ri (

( )d

(15)

]=

P=2 T

exp( )

(9) (10)

and
V ar Zi=

]=

P T 2 exp (2 12N 3

K No T ) X rk;i + 4 k=1 k6=i

This expression (16) holds for the transmission of K synchronous CDM signals spread by perfectly orthogonal codes (since the total interference parameter is equal to zero in this case). The selected criterion for overall system performance is the < BERav >, de ned as the average bit error probability for an average user for which the total interference PK K 1 parameter is set to be equal to RK av = N k=1 Ri . In addition, the user's average energy per bit to noise ratio (without multiple-access interference) < Eb =No > is given by
< Eb =No >= (Eb =No )

?1

2(Eb =No )exp( )

( ) d (16)

where rk;i is the average interference parameter between the ith and kth users and is expressed by Pursley 6] in terms of the aperiodic autocorrelation functions. In the above expressions, the conditional expectations have been taken with respect to the independent random variables k , k , bk;?1 , and bk;0 , assuming that there is an equal probability that the data symbols bk;i are equal to +1 or -1 for k 6= i. Let us now de ne the ith user's average conditional signalto-noise ratio SN Ri ( ) as E Zi = ] SN Ri ( ) = p (11) V ar Zi= ]

?1

exp(2 )

( )d

(17)

4. NUMERICAL RESULTS

A set of 50 Gold codes of length N = 511 bits were generated and assigned to 50 users. Initially, we study the e ect of scintillation on a system with a xed number (K = 20) of active users. The solid curve (a) in Figure 1 represents the scintillation-free channel reference case. In Figure 1, we have also plotted performance curves (b, c, d) for increasing scintillation intensities at a xed index of variation, = 0. As can be expected, performance degrades as 2 increases. After the substitution of expressions (9) and (10) in (11) The curves (a, b, c, d) in Figure 2 illustrate the impact and a simple rearrangement, we obtain the conditional SN Ri ( ) of the variability of the scintillation by keeping its longconditioned on as term standard deviation constant at 0.8 dB and increasing . These curves extend the conclusion found in 5], since ? 1 = 2 exp( ? 2 ) RK they also show the worst degradation (at high SNR) for the i (12) SN Ri ( ) = highest scintillation variability statistics. 6 N 3 + 2 (Eb =No )

10

Effect of the Scintillation Intensity

10

10

10

10

a 10
7

10

10

10

10

10 12 14 Average Received SNR, <Eb/No> dB

16

18

Secondly, we study the impact of scintillation on a DS/SS channel with a variable number of active users. The average total interference parameter RK av was thus evaluated for di erent values of K . Figure 3 shows the performance achieved for an average user operating when, respectively, 1 (curve a), 15 (b), 30 (c), and 50 users (d), are simultaneously accessing a free fading channel (solid curves) or a scintillating channel (dashed curves). The parameter set used to obtain the curves of Figure 3 is m =0.752 dB and =0.5. It can be seen that as the number of active users increases, the scintillation induced < Eb =No > degradation (for a xed < BERav >) decreases. As an example, the < Eb =No > degradation at < BERav >= 10?6 is less then 0.1 dB for 50 active users, whereas it is 0.5 dB for 30 active users, 0.7 dB for 15 active users, and 0.85 dB for the single user case.

Figure 1: Average BER for increasing scintillation intensities ((a) m = 0 dB, (b) m = 0.4 dB, (c) m = 0.8 dB, and (d) m = 1.2 dB).
10
2

Average Probabaility of Error <BERav>

5. CONCLUSION
An analysis of the average BER performance of a binary DS/SS satellite communication system operating in a scintillating channel has been presented. Numerical results show that the performance is expected to degrade as the scintillation intensity increases and to be worse for sites with the highest scintillation variability statistics. It may also be concluded that the degradation is predominated by co-channel interference, rather than by signal uctuations, when a high number of asynchronous users are simultaneously accessing a satellite. In the future, we plan to verify these theoretical predictions by experimental measurements conducted as part of the Georgia Tech ACTS propagation e ects experiment.

Effect of the Scintillation Variability

10

Average Probabaility of Error <BERav>

10

10

10

10

d c b a

10

10

6. REFERENCES
18

10

10

10 12 14 Average Received SNR, <Eb/No> dB

16

Figure 2: Average BER for increasing scintillation variability indicies ((a) = 0, (b) = 0.5, (c) = 0.75, and (d) = 1).
10
2

Effect of the Number of Active Users

10

10

10

c 10
6

b a

10

10

8 9 10 11 Average Received SNR, <Eb/No> dB

12

13

14

Figure 3: Average BER for di erent numbers of active users ((a) K = 1, (b) K = 15, (c) K = 30, and (d) K = 50).

1] D. H. Howard and P. G. Ste es, \Georgia Tech ACTS class II experiment," in Proceedings of the VI ACTS Propagation Studies Workshop (APSW VI), pp. 159{ 177, November 1994. 2] D. C. Cox, H. W. Arnold, and H. H. Ho man, \Observations of cloud-produced amplitude scintillations on 19and 28-GHz earth-space paths," Radio Science, vol. 16, no. 5, pp. 885{907, 1981. 3] T. J. Mousley and E. Vilar, \Experimental and theoretical statistics of microwave amplitude scintillations on satellite down-links," IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, vol. AP-30, no. 6, pp. 1099{1106, 1982. 4] R. K. Crane and D. W. Blood, \Handbook for the estimation of microwave propagation e ects - Links calculations for earth-space paths (path loss and noise estimation)," Tech. Rep. P-7376-TR1, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, 1979. 5] O. P. Banjo and E. Vilar, \Binary error probabilities on earth-space links subject to scintillation fading," Electronics Letters, vol. 21, no. 7, pp. 296{297, 1985. 6] M. B. Pursley, \Performance evaluation for phasecoded spread-spectrum multiple-access communicationParts I & II," IEEE Transactions on Communications, vol. COM-25, no. 8, pp. 795{803, 1977.

Average Probabaility of Error <BERav>