Cooperative DVB-SH satellite broadcasting systems with rotated signal constellations

In this paper, we study the advantages of cooperation in broadcasting systems from a geosynchronous earth orbit (GEO) satellite to mobile terminals (MTs), achieved through a terrestrial complementary ground station (CGS) with fixed installment, which acts as a relay. Moreover and in the context of the digital video broadcasting-satellite- to-handheld (DVB-SH) standard, the performance improvements offered by the rotated constellations method are investigated, where prior transmission, a phase rotation of the transmitted symbols by a fixed angle is applied followed by a random component interleaver. Turbo codes with soft decision decoding and appropriate random channel interleavers are also considered. We present analytical expressions for the bit log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) that are needed for soft decision decoding at the MT turbo decoder, while the code combining technique is adapted to improve the end-to-end (E2E) performance. Then, we obtain through extensive computer simulations the average bit error probability (ABEP) of quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) signals received over pure land-mobile satellite (LMS) and pure CGS links for coding rates 1/3 and 6/7. Moreover, the optimal rotation angles are obtained for both links. E2E ABEP results are then presented assuming cooperation between GEO and CGS, while the power allocation issue is investigated under fixed total transmission power. Our performance evaluation results show that by using the constellation rotation technique, a performance gain can be achieved for high coding rates.