Impact of ionospheric scintillations on LEO satellite DS-CDMA communication system

The impact of ionospheric scintillations is investigated in terms of bit error rate for a multispot beam LEO satellite communication system employing direct sequence-code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) technique. Depending on the satellite orbit parameters and the Earth station location, the effect of time-varying ionospheric scintillation on the system varies. Performance degradation can be substantial in times of severe scintillations.