DefinePK

Abstract

Mobile satellite communication (MSC) system has become an essential part of the world telecommunication infrastructure. However, it is characterized by multipath fading effects. Equal Gain Combining (EGC) which was one of the techniques previously used to address this problem also suffers from hardware complexity. A modified EGC (mEGC) with single radio frequency chain and single matched filter was developed to mitigate the effects and reduce the hardware complexity. The performance of mEGC was evaluated using Bit Error Rate (BER) and the processing time. The results at mobile speed of 120 km/hr and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 6 dB; BER of 0.0063, 0.0503, and 0.0693 were obtained as against 0.0114, 0.0504, and 0.0695, for the conventional EGC with 4QAM, 16QAM, and 64QAM, respectively, also, the processing time of 0.0313s, 0.0156s, and 0.0157s were obtained for mEGC as against 0.0469s, 0.0469s, 0.0417s respectively for convectional. The modified EGC receiver gave approximately the same BER performance when compared with the conventional EGC receiver and thus reduced hardware complexity.