TECHNICAL DESIGN AND SERVICE ASPECTS OF

DIGITAL MOBILE SATELLITE COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS

Yutaka YASUDA, Masayoshi OHASHI, Fumiaki SUGAYA, Yasuo HIRATA
KDD Meguro R b D Laboratories
1-23, Nakameguro 2Ichome , Meguro-ku, Tokyo 153, Japan
ABSTRACT
Global mobile communication services such
as maritime, aeronautical and land mobile
communications are effectively provided by
using the satellite. Since the power and
bandwidth available for respective carrier
are severely limited under the mobile
satellite communications environment, the
application of digital transmission
technologies is very attractive to utilize
the limited satellite resources efficiently.
The various new integrated digital communication services will be also effectively
provided in the digital transmission systems.
In this paper, the key technical elements for
designing the digital mobile satellite
communication systems are clarified together
with the discussions on the future trend of
the communication services to be offered for
mobile users.
1. INTRODUCTION

Authors had designed and developed

several digital maritime communication
systems so far, and conducted the field
experiments by using INMARSAT (International
Maritime Satellite Organization) satellite in
1984 and 1986 in order to investigate their
performance characteristics under the actual
maritime satellite communication environment
[Refs. 1-41. Such a digital voice-grade
maritime satellite communication system is
called "Standard-B" in INMARSAT and is going
to be introduced in its second generation era
[Ref. 51. Based on the experience of
designing the digital maritime communication
systems, we have also developed aeronautical
digital voice-grade communication subsystem
to be used for an experimental aeronautical
satellite communication system. The field
trial of this system has been successfully
conducted by using passenger airplane via
INMARSAT Pacific ocean region satellite.

transmission technologies such as voice

coding, FEC (Forward Error Correction),
digital modulation and synchronization are
discussed taking account of our experience of
the hardware implementation and the results
of the field experiments. Then, the
trade-off studies on the satellite e.i.r.p.
requirements and the antenna G/T of the mobile
terminal are made based on the link budget
calculation. Furthermore, new services which
will be effectively offered to mobile users
in the digital transmission systems are
studied. These new services cover the
facsimile and data transmission combined with
personal computer communication. The
possibility of offering video transmission
services for mobile users are also discussed.
2. KEY TECHNICAL ELEMENT FOR SYSTEM DESIGN

System Confinuration

2.1

Figure 1 shows the overall configuration

of the mobile satellite communication systems.
The low gain antenna is used for mobile earth
stations, while the relatively high gain
antenna is employed for the ground earth
Sate II ite

- band

CImEKm

In this paper, basic configuration of

digital mobile satellite communication
systems is reviewed, and the key digital

*Or*

*%

L - band

e
SES

GES

: Aeronautical Earth Station

Ship Earth Station

: Ground Earth Station

: Network Coordination Station

Fig.1

Overall System Configuration for

Mobile Satellite Communications

34.2.1.
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is

NCS

(Terrestrial)

CH2538-7/88/0000-1094$1 .OO

0 1988 IEEE

station to enable stable communication with

mobile terminals under the severely
power-limited condition. As for the
access/control of the communication channel,
the demand assignment technique is generally
applied in order to share the limited
satellite channel resources with many mobile
users. In the IlwABSAT system, the network
control station (NCS) is provided in each
ocean region to carry out the centralized
control for the demand assignment operation.
At the mobile earth station, the antenna
and BF unit (up- and down-converters) are
combined with the communication channel
unit. Figure 2 shows the basic configuration
of the digital voice-grade communication
subsystem. The communication channel bank
composed of the multiple digital communication
subsystems is provided at the ground earth
station. It will be connected at IF stage
with the antenua/RF facilities for ground
earth station which may be commonly used for
different kinds of mobile services.
2.2

Kev Dinital Technolonies

For voice-grade digital communications,

the low bit rate (4.8 kbit/s - 16 kbit/s)
voice coding scheme which can provide good
voice quality at the given bit rates must be
employed in order to cope with the limited
power/bandwidth constraints of the
communication channel. The APC-MLQ coding
[Ref. 61 is going to be used in the INMARSAT
digital maritime communication system
(Standard-B) and the aeronautical
communication system, because it can provide
high voice quality at reasonable hardware
size and is robust to the transmission bit
errors caused in the mobile communications
environment. This coding scheme also has an
advantage that the coding bit rate of the
voice codec can be easily changed according
to the system requirements if it is so
designed.
As for the FEC coding, the effective
coding scheme with high coding gain 1s
required in order to save the power
requirement for the satellite and/or for
mobile earth stations. The soft decision
Viterbi decoding for convolutional code is
data
voice

widely used for such a purpose. Regarding

the coding rate of the convolutional code, the
punctured codes with the rate higher than 1/2
[Ref. 71 will be suitable in the case that
the bandwidth saving is strongly required for
each channel. When the multipath fading
severely degrades the bit error rate
performance of the communication channel, bit
interleaving of the transmission bits (after
FEC coding) will be effective to minimize such
a performance degradation at the FEC decoder.
However, in this case, the increase of the
signal delay due to bit interleaving and
de-interleaving must be taken into account.
The frame synchronization is also very
important for the stable operation of the
digital communication equipment. Under the
mobile satellite communication environment,
since the link C/A (carrier-to-noise power
ratio) becomes very low and fluctuates because
of the signal level variation due to various
factors such as multipath fading, the frame
synchronization scheme robust to such a severe
link condition must be employed. In order to
establish a frame synchronization quickly and
to maintain the synchronized status stably,
the framing bits (unique word) of the fixed
length and the fixed bit pattern are
periodically inserted into the transmitted
bit stream. When the coherent demodulation
technique is employed, the influence of the
phase ambiguity caused in such a demodulator
can be also removed by observing the pattern
of the framing bits in the demodulated bit
sequence.
As for the modulation technique, the
power and bandwidth efficient digital
modulation such as filtered QPSK is generally
desired. However, when a Class-C HPA is used
for the mobile terminal, it will be necessary
to employ a family of constant envelope
modulation schemes such as offset QPSK and
MSK in order to reduce the out-of-band
emission as much as possible at the HPA
output. Furthermore, since the demodulator
must operate at very low C/N condition when
the FEC code with high coding gain is
employed, the stable operation of the carrier
and clock recovery circuit under such a
condition is also very important requirement
for the demodulator, When the bit rates of
the transmission channel becomes very low (in
the order of a few kbit/s), the 2-phase
modulation (e.g. BPSK) rather than the 4-phase
modulation such as QPSK is applied to ease
the carrier/clock acquisition and tracking.
2.3

Fig.2

Block Diagram of Digital Communication

Subsystem

ExamDle of Channel Parameters

The basic channel parameters of the

INMARSAT Standard-B and aeronautical

34.2.2.
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communication systems are shown in Table 1

for reference. Figure 3 shows the frame
formats of the digital voice-grade
communication channels for these two systems.
In the aeronautical communication system, the
bit interleaving technique of the block size
of 384 (= 6 4 x 6) bits is applied to the
coded data sequence to cope with the burst
errors caused by the fast fading under the
aeronautical transmission environment. The
total signal delay due to this interleaving
and de-interleaving is around 36 msec.

Informat ion
bit rate

16 kbit/s
(option: 9.6 kbit/s)

3. TRADE-OFF STUDY ON TRANSMISSION PARAMETERS

3.1

Reauired C/Bo Versus Information Bit Rate

Figure 4 shows the theoretical relation

of the required C/Bo (C: carrier power, No:
one-sided noise spectral density) versus
information bit rates to obtain the bit error
In this figure, the
rate (BER) of lo-?
employment of ideal coherent PSK modulation
and the FEC based on the soft decision Viterbi
decoding are assumed. As for the coding rate
of convolutional codes for Viterbi decoding,
the rate 1/2 code with constraint length K=7
and the rate 3/4 and 7/8 punctured codes
derived from it are selected. The required
C/No to obtain objective BER for the given
information bit rate (Br) has been calculated
by the following equation, assuming the
theoretical BER versus Eb/No (Eb: energy per
information bit) performance for respective
FEC code [Ref. 71.

9.6 kbit/s

C/Bo(dB) = Eb/No(dB)

Modulation

T X / filters
~
~

~~

QPSK
- -- -- Offset
- - -- --

Transmission
bit rate

24 kbit/a

21 kbit/s
17.5 kHz

20 kHz

Carrier spacing
G/T of mobile

-4 dBK
(low G/T: -10 dBK)

terminal

RF -channel

-13 dBK

frame = 80 ms4-

PREAMBLE
(BURST MODE UW
ONLY)

CODED

DATA

80 [

448

---

FB

10 loglOBr

148

+I1872

bits

No

60
VOICE
sB FIELD
'
1
1 2 4 7' 320 I

before F E C coding( r a t e 3/41

L 3 5 1

(a)

VOICE
FIELD

4 (SB :
FE

"4"

Framing Bits
Sub-band signalling field

frame = 500 ms
1

k 2 0 4 d

(b)

7/0
314
I/2

(X)

----------

BLOCK27

5J FIE
O A T ~ V C ~ CDATA
E
VOICE
FIELD FIE FIELD -------------I

M T A VOICE
FIE FIELD
25
25

I X for sub-band rlgnalllng and user data

30

1.2

2.4

4.8 7.2 9.6

16

32

64

Information Bit Rate (kbit/s)

Aeronautical System

Frame Format of Voice Communication

Channel (specified in INMARSAT)

Fig.4

34.2.3.
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Coding

BER = 10-5

VOICE
FIELD

Standard-B System

BLOCK 2

Fig.3

VOICE
FIELD

RF -channel

before FEC coding( r a t e 1/2)

(1)

When the rate 1/2 FEC code is applied to

the 9.6 kbit/s information channel for
example, we can see from Figure 4 that the
is about 44
required C/No at BER =
dBHz. If additional bits are inserted at the
transmission channel after F E C coding for the
frame/burst synchronization and for other
purposes such as a signalling transmission,
the transmission channel bit rate must be
increased according to the ratio of such
additional bits. Therefore, in such a case,
it is necessary to take account of an extra
margin in the required C/No.

Square root raised-cosine Nyquist

filter with 60% roll-off

Required C/No vs. Information Bit

Rate (Objective BER =

3.2

Link Budget Trade-off

The channel C/No was calculated as a

function of the G/T or the e.i.r.p. of the
mobile terminal assuming the typical
transmission parameters of the INMARSAT
satellite link. Since the overall link C/No
in the mobile satellite communication systems
is generally determined by the link parameters
between the mobile earth station and the
satellite, the L-band satellite e.i.r.p. in
the forward (C-to-L) link and the L-band
satellite G/T in the return (L-to-C) link
were taken as parameters in this calculation.
Satellite e I r p (dBW)

Figures 5 and 6 show the performance of

the total satellite link C/No versus G/T and
e.i.r.p. of the mobile earth station. In
these figures, the link parameters for the
INMARSAT current Standard-A, Standard-B and
aeronautical voice-grade channels are marked.
The example of link budget calculations for
these systems other than the Standard-A is
shown in Table 2, which also includes the
link budget for a low G/T (-10 dBK) ship
earth station system using Japanese
Experimental Test Satellite (ETS-V) [Ref. 8 1 .
Since the ETS-V satellite has two L-band spot
beams, the satellite e.i.r.p. and G/T in the
link between the satellite and mobile earth
station are far higher than those of INMARSAT
global beam satellite. Therefore, the
high-speed data transmission such as of 64
kbit/s information rate will become possible
even for the low G/T mobile terminal. (See
Section 4.)
Table 2 Example of Link Budget Calculations
[ Satellite System ]

INKARSAT
(INTELSAT-V/MCS)

Std-B

Aero.

ETS-V
low-G/T SES

(a) Ground-to-mobile link

UD link:

(Frequency)
GES elevation
GES EIRP (dBW)
Path loss (dB)
Absorption loss (dB)
Satellite G/T (dBK)
Up link C/No (dBHz)

-20

-15

-IO

-5

Satellite:
Satellite gain (dB)
Satellite C/IMo (dBHz)

Mobile Terminal G/T (dBK)

Fig.5

U : (Frequency)
Satellite EIRP (dBW)
Path loss (dB)
Absorption loss (dB)
Mobile G/T (dBK)
Down link C/No (dBHz)

Total Link C/No vs. G/T of Mobile

Terminal
Satellite G / T ( d B K )
'- I O

L i n k Performance (unfadedl:
Total C/No (dBHz)

(6.42 GHz)
(5 degs.)
55.5
62.0
200.9

0.4
-14
68.8

75.3

161.3
61.3

67.8

166.5

(1.54 GHz)
15.5
22.0
188.5
0.4
-4
-13
51.2
48.7
50.7

48.6

'- I 2
'-14

z
\

Satellite:
Satellite gain (dB)
Satellite C/IMo (dBHz)

Down link:

(Frequency)
Satellite EIRP (dBW)
Path loss (dB)
Absorption loss (dB)
GES G/T (dBK)
Down link C/No (dBHz)

Fig.6

Total Link C/No vs. EIRP of Mobile

Terminal

--

(1.54 GHz)
32.9
187.6
0.2
-10
63.7
63.7

(b) Mobile-to-ground link

UD l i n k :
(Frequency)
(1.64 GHz)
Mobile terminal elevation
(5 degs.)
Mobile EIRP (dBW)
33
25.5
Path loss (dB)
189.0
Absorption loss (dB)
0.4
Satellite G/T (dBK)
-13
Up link C/No (dBHz)
59.2
51.7

f!

(5.96 GHz)
(47 degs.)
66.0
199.4
0.2
-8
87.0

Link Derformance (unfaded):

Total C/No (dBHz)

150.9
62.5

165.1
55.0

(4.2 GHz)
-5.5
-13.0
197.2
0.4
32
57.5
50.0

54.5

(1.64 GHz)
(47 degs.)
27.2
188.2
0.2
-4.9
62.5

47 .O

--

(5.2 GHz)
3.9
198.2
0.2
33.7
67.8
61.4

34.2.4.
1097

It should be also noted that the multipath

fading margin is not included in the link
budget calculations shown in Table 2.
Therefore, when the elevation angle of the
mobile earth station is low, the appropriate
fading margin must be taken into account.
The required C/No under the unfaded condition
is determined from the BER objective shown in
Figure 4 by adding hardware implementation
margin, etc. The amount of the fading margin
depends on the antenna size of the mobile
earth station and the elevation angle of it
toward the satellite. Figure 7 shows the
measured results of the fading depth versus
elevation angle of the ship earth station
antenna under the actual INMARSAT maritime
satellite communication link. These data
were obtained by the field experiment on the
digital ship earth station systems using a
high-G/T (-4 dBK) parabolic antenna and a
low-G/T (-10 dBK) short-backfire antenna with
fading reduction capability [Refs. 4, 91.

Voice
I n the INMARSAT Standard-B system, the
APC-MLQ voice coding of 16 kbit/s is going to
be used in order to provide toll quality voice
communication services. I n the aeronautical
communication systems, 9.6 kbit/s APC-MLQ
voice coding is also going to be used. In
the future land mobile communication systems,
further reduction of voice coding rate (e.g.
4.8 kbit/s) may be needed in order to
minimize the power and bandwidth requirement
per channel. Such a low rate voice coding
will be also effectively employed when two or
more voice channels must be integrated into
single digital communication channel. For
instance, two independent voice channels of
4.8 kbit/s can be integrated in a single 9.6
kbit/s digital voice-grade channel in the
aeronautical communication systems in which
the multiple voice communication capability
for passengers and cabin crews is strongly
desired.

4. SERVICE CONSIDERATION

Facsimile
I n the current INMARSAT Standard-A system
using analog companded FM modulation, 63
facsimile transmission of up to 2.4 kbit/s is
guaranteed. This capability is also
maintained when 16 kbit/s APC voice codec is
applied in the INMARSAT Standard-B system.
Furthermore, in the mobile satellite
communication systems with a digital
transmission channel at the bit rate of 9.6
kbit/s or more, the 63 facsimile transmission
at a speed of 9.6 kbit/s becomes possible by
providing appropriate analog-digital interface
at the ground earth station. I n this case,
the facsimile signal is transmitted in the
digital form via digital satellite
communication channel, whereas in the
terrestrial analog PSTN (public switched
telephone network), it is transmitted through
the conventional V.29 voice-band modem
incorporated in the 63 facsimile equipment or
through the V.32 modem which enables both-way
9.6 kbit/s data transmission via 2-wire local
line. When the digital communication
channels become widely available in the
public terrestrial networks, the satellite
data channel of the arbitral bit rate is
directly connected to such a terrestrial data
channel without using voice-band modem. I n
such a case, higher speed 64 facsimile
transmission such as 16 kbit/s will also
become available for the relatively high G/T
mobile earth station systems.

I n the digital mobile satellite

communication systems, the various integrated
digital communication services will be
provided in addition to the conventional
voice services. These new services include
high-speed facsimile transmission, personal
computer (PC) communications and compressed
video/picture transmission, etc. In this
section, the future evolution of such
communication services is considered, taking
account of the possible technical progress.

OHigh-G/T

( F R ON)

oLow-G/T
A

5a 6

zM
.-c
a

0
0

(FR : OFF)

II

0
0
0

0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
4
6
8
10
12
14
Elevation Angle (deg.)
High-G/T: 85cm parabolic antenna (G/T = -4 dBK)
Low-G/T : 40cm short backfire (G/T = -10 dBK)
with fading reduction (FR) capability

Fig.7

Measure Results of Fading Depth vs.

Elevation Angle (maritime)

Personal Computer Communication

I n the mobile satellite communication
systems such as maritime and aeronautical
ones, the data transmission by using the
personal computer is an effective mean to
deal with the various communication services
in an integrated digital form. For the

34.2.5.
1098

aeronautical applications, the use of a handy

laptop PC computer will be practical and very
attractive in order to communicate from the
cabin with the user on the ground. The
personal computer communication includes the
file transfer and database access in addition
to the conventional message exchange. If the
appropriate image scanner and/or a facsimile
equipment is combined with the PC terminal,
the figure/image transmission between mobile
user and the ground user will become an
attractive service. The high speed and
error-free both-way data transmission between
PC terminals is realized by using the HDLC
specified in the OS1 (Open Systems
Interconnection) protocol. In such a system,
it is important to select the appropriate
packet size as well as the window size for
the ARQ control to get the maximum throughput
at the mobile satellite communication channel
with fairly large signal transmission delay.
Compressed Video/Still Picture
If there is enough power margin, the high
speed data transmission channel such as 64
kbit/s can be also provided. Such a channel
can accommodate the integrated audiohide0
transmission for visual telephone services by
using the highly compressed voice/picture
coding equipment. In this year, we are
planning to conduct such an experiment on the
64 kbit/s audiohide0 transmission over
maritime communication channel via Japanese
ETS-V satellite by using the INVITE 64 system
developed by KDD [Ref. lo]. In addition to
this, the still picture of qualified color
image will be also transmitted via lower rate
channel such as 9.6 kbit/s.
5. CONCLUSION
The key technical elements in designing
the digital mobile satellite communication
systems were identified and the trade-off
studies on the transmission parameters of the
satellite link were made based on our
experience of the experimental system
development and the results of the field
trials. Then, the future evolution of the
various new communication services to be
offered in the digital mobile communication
systems were discussed.
In the digital mobile satellite
communication systems which will be operated
under the condition of low C/N and with a
signal level fluctuation due to multipath
fading etc., it is the most important
requirement to establish the frame
synchronization quickly and maintain it
stable in addition to the stable
carrier/clock tracking under such a severe
link condition. This was one of the major

results which we obtained through the various

field experiments on the digital maritime and
aeronautical satellite communication systems.
REFERENCES

1. Y. Hirata, Y. Yasuda and H. Okinaka,

"Design of digital standard system for the
future INMARSAT system," 3rd IEE Int.
Conf. on Satellite Systems for Mobile
Commun. and Navigation, pp. 107-111, June
1983.
2. Y. Hirata, Y. Yasuda, H. Okinaka and K.
Kashiki, "A digital transmission system
for global maritime satellite
communications," Proc. IEEE, vol. 72, 11,
pp. 1620-1626, NOV. 1984
3. K. Kashiki, H. Okinaka, Y. Yasuda, T.
Shiokawa and Y. Hirata, "Field test
results on a digital transmission system
for global maritime satellite
communications," 1985 Int. Conf. on
Commun., Chicago, pp. 16.5.1-16.5.7, June
1985.
4. Y. Yasuda, M. Ohashi, F. Sugaya, H.
Okinaka and Y. Hirata, "Field experiment
on digital maritime satellite
communication systems," 1987 Global
Telecommunications Conference (Globecom),
Tokyo, pp. 42.4.1-42.4.6, NOV. 1987.
5. A. Ghais, "Future development of the
INMARSAT system," AIAA 10th Commun. Sat.
Syst. Conf., Orlando, AIAA-84-0750, pp.
440-449, March 1984.
6. Y. Yatsuzuka, S. Iizuka and T. Yamazaki,
"A variable rate coding by APC with
maximum likelihood quantization from 4.8
kbit/s to 16 kbit/s," 1986 International
Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal
Processing (ICASSP), Tokyo, pp.
56.12.1-56.12.4, April 1986.
7. Y. Yasuda, K. Kashiki and Y. Hirata,
"High-rate punctured convolutional codes
for soft decision Viterbi decoding," IEEE
Trans. Commun., vol. COM-32, 3, pp.
315-319, March 1984.
8. S. Miura, M. Wakao and N. Futagawa,
"L-band transponder of ETS-V for
experimental mobile satellite system,"
1985 International Conference on
Communications (ICC), Chicago, pp.
24.5.1-24.5.4, June 1985.
9. T. Shiokawa and Y. Karasawa, "Shipborne
antennas suppressing multipath fading in
maritime satellite communication," 1982
Int. IEEE/APS Symposium, Albuquerque, pp.
390-393, May 1982.
10. H. Yamaguchi, M. Wada and H. Yamamoto, "A
64 kbit/s integrated visual communication
system - new communication medium for the
ISDN," IEEE Journ. on SAC, vol. SAC-4, 8,
pp. 1202-1209, NOV. 1986.

34.2.6.
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