Emulation of channel model and estimation for MIMO based satellite land mobile system using software defined radio

Abstract Land mobile satellite system (LMS) with multiantenna setup is explored in order to achieve better performance reliability and increase in capacity. The prime objective of this work is to emulate the channel accounting for channel effects for the geostationary satellite orbits with terrestrial fading conditions in the downlink segment. The three state channel model given by Loo consisting of Line of sight, Moderate shadowing, Deep shadowing conditions with its impact on determining the channel parameters i.e mean, standard deviation and multipath power is considered. Also the analysis of these parameters with respect to cross polar discrimination of antenna and cross polar coupling of an environment is performed. In addition to this, the impact of elevation angle on cross polar discrimination and cross polar coupling effect is also analyzed in order to have better link reliability. In this work a LMS channel model is developed considering all of the above conditions in GNU radio and validated using Universal Software Radio Peripheral. The bit error rate of the system is found to be 10-5 with perfect channel statistics known at the receiver.