OPEN-LOOP POWER-CONTROL ERROR IN A LAND MOBILE SATELLITE SYSTEM

In order to combat large scale shadowing and distance losses in a land mobile satellite system, an adaptive power control (APC) scheme is essential. Such a scheme, implemented on the uplink, ensures that all users' signals arrive at the base station with equal average power as they move within the satellite spot beam-an important requirement in a CDMA system. Because of the lengthy round-trip delay on a satellite link, closed-loop power control systems are only of marginal benefit. Therefore, an open-loop APC scheme is proposed to counteract the effects of shadowing and distance loss. A fairly general channel model, consisting of log-normal shadowing and Rician fading, is assumed. This can be applied to a specific two-state land mobile satellite channel model, involving shadowed intervals with Rayleigh fading and unshadowed intervals with Rician fading. It is found that the power control error can be approximated by a log-normally distributed random variable. To quantify the performance of the APC, the standard deviation of the power control error in decibels is analyzed as a function of the specular power-to-scatter power ratio, the measurement time and the vehicle velocity. To illustrate the usefulness of the results, we analyze the effect of the power control error on the system capacity of a CDMA mobile satellite link.