Performance of M-ary FSK modulation in a land mobile satellite communication channel

M-ary frequency shift keying (M-FSK) is a power efficient modulation scheme that is currently being proposed and studied for low power and low data rate applications (e.g., global paging via satellite). The power efficiency of this modulation increases as the signal alphabet increases at the expense of increased complexity and reduced bandwidth efficiency. In this paper, an analysis of this modulation´s uncoded performance is presented in a land mobile satellite communication channel using a channel model that includes the effects of shadowing. Results that are applicable to detection of differential phase-shift keying (DPSK), a robust modulation method commonly used for signalling channels, are also presented and extensions to coded performance using Reed-Solomon coding are derived. The results of this paper should be useful in the determination of link margins and as a reference for validating the results of simulation studies