A Cooperative Mobile Satellite Communication System with the Dynamic Space-Time Coding

Abstract

Channels of mobile satellite communications are affected by multipath fading and shadowing attenuation. At the same time, diversity gains are believed to improve the transmission reliability in fading channels. Considering that the traditional Space-Time Coding (STC) is not suitable for the cooperative mobile satellite communication, in this paper, a new cooperative mobile satellite communication system is proposed based on the Dynamic Space-Time Coding (D-STC). The transmitting energy of the proposed scheme is saved by avoiding forwarding erroneous signals in cooperative users. Meanwhile, this system benefits from diversity gains and the transmission is robust. Additionally, a closed-form expression of the outage probability for the proposed scheme is derived, and then it is demonstrated that this scheme is much better than the existing noncooperative scheme and schemes with traditional STCs in the outage performance. Finally, the analytical result is supported and validated by numerical simulations.