ABSTRACT
Two classes of multicarrier direct sequence code-division multiple-access are defined, namely
Multitone DS-CDMA and Orthogonal multicarrier DS-CDMA. Their performances are considered
over land mobile satellite channels with L-branch diversity using maximum ratio combining
technique. The average bit error rate for the two classes are investigated and compared using
coherent binary phase shift keying modulation. It is assumed that the channel consists of Nakagami
distributed shadowed line-of-site signal plus Rayleigh distributed multipath signals. Using
measured channel parameters, the performance is evaluated for light, average and heavy shadowing
and fading environments.