A Propagation Simulator for Land Mobile Satellite Communications

The performance of a mobile satellite communications link can be determined by the propagation path between a satellite and mobile users. Some of the most important factors are multipath propagation and vegetative shadowing. System designers should have the most reliable information about the statistics of fade duration in order to determine fade margin or to compensate for the fades using modulation and coding scheme.

This report describes a simulator, PROSIM, developed at Virginia Tech for simulating a propagation model in land mobile satellite communications. The simulator is based on a random number generator that generates data sets to compute statistics of the propagation channel. Performance of the simulator was evaluated by comparing statistics from an analytical model and experimental data provided by W. Vogel of Univ. of Texas at Austin and J. Goldhirsh of the Applied Physics Laboratory. New expressions for phasor plot and its mathematical expression for lognormal channel were derived and were simulated. Finally, the advantages of the simulator using random number generator in simulating the propagation model are described.