Transmit diversity and performance analysis for aeronautical broadband satellite communication systems

Abstract This paper analyzes the downlink transmission performance of an aeronautical broadband satellite communication system operating at millimeter wave (mmWave) band. Specifically, by considering that two adjacent satellites cooperatively communicate with an airplane employing an antenna array, we first propose a simple transmit scheme combining Alamouti space time block coding (STBC) with receive beamforming (BF) to improve the system performance. Then, by considering the phase shift errors in phased array antenna deployed at the airplane, we analyze the equivalent output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the considered communication system. Further, with the help of the moment generating function (MGF) approach, we derive the average symbol error rate (ASER) of the system with the proposed transmit scheme, where the satellite links undergo correlated shadow-Rician (SR) fading. Finally, computer simulations are conducted to confirm the validity of the theoretical analysis and reveal the effect of phase errors on the performance of the aeronautical broadband communication system.