Impact of Tropospheric Scintillation on Direct-sequence Spread-spectrum Satellite Communication Networks

Tropospheric scintillation can seriously aaect satellite links operating at Ka-band. The average bit error probability for a multiuser binary direct-sequence spread-spectrum satellite communication network operating under amplitude scintillation is evaluated. Numerical results are presented to illustrate performance comparisons of systems operating under typical scintillation statistics. As in the single user case, it is shown that the average system performance gradually degrades as the scintillation intensity increases and is worse for a high variability of these events. Results also indicate that the impact of amplitude tropospheric scin-tillations becomes less important as the number of asyn-chronous active users increases.