A comparison of data modulation techniques for land mobile satellite channels

Several modulation schemes for transmitting data over land mobile satellite channels are compared using a Monte Carlo simulation. Schemes under consideration include differentially detected minimum shift keying (DMSK), differentially detected filtered offset quadrature phase shift keying (DOQPSK), and coherently detected binary phase shift keying with transparent tone-in-band processing (BPSK-TTIB). The transmission of data to and from a mobile radio, which is also capable of operating as an amplitude companded single sideband radio, is the application considered here. The nominal bit rate is 2400 bit/s, while the nominal channel spacing is 5 kHz. DOQPSK with nonredundant single-error correction (SEC) is shown to be a promising candidate. It is capable of outperforming DMSK with SEC by more than 1 dB. Techniques that send a reference signal along with a PSK signal and then perform coherent detection, such as BPSK-TTIB, are also shown to be inferior to DOQPSK with SEC for the class of channels considered here.