Conversion From Channel Attenuation To Data Rate Estimation

In an early development state for a wireless terrestrial or satellite communication system, channel path attenuation data is typically collected first under an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) in the line of sight by transmitting a carrier frequency signal without modulation. This is because these data can be obtained economically, and will be useful for an radio frequency (RF) communication system engineer to determine the transmit power, antenna type, antenna size, modulation type, forward error correction coding type, code rate, data rate, and so on. The objective of this paper is to study how to convert from this set of channel path attenuation measurement data obtained under AWGN to useful information such as data rate, i.e., bandwidth efficiency (BWE) in bits per second per Hertz of the channel under a general fading channel environment. The adaptive code modulation (ACM) has been used recently in both terrestrial and satellite modern communications systems. To achieve the objective, the Digital Video Broadcasting - Second Generation (DVB-S2) satellite communication system is considered under a memoryless flat Rayleigh fading channel to exploit its ACM scheme as an example. Then it is observed that the bit error rate (BER) of the DVB-S2 under non-line of sight (NLOS), memoryless, flat (i.e., single multipath) Rayleigh fading with no Doppler frequency shift could not reach 10 with practical symbol-energy-to-noise ratio. Hence, in this paper BER of 10 criterion is used and steps to compute the BWE for a given set of channel attenuation data under memoryless, NLOS, flat, and no Doppler Rayleigh fading is presented.