Statistical channel modelling and performance evaluation in satellite personal communications

This paper is concerned with channel modelling for satellite personal communications and with the associated problem of performance evaluation. Channel characteristics for personal communications tend to differ from those traditionally accepted for vehicular communications. In this paper we report on modelling aspects for both wideband and narrowband personal communications. Then we consider performance evaluation for low-altitude earth orbit (LEO) satellite systems in terms of bit error probability and outage probability. To evaluate the outage probability for LEO systems, a tight and simple upper bound is finally provided. (C) 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.