Renewal Properties of Fade and Interfade Duration on Land Mobile Satellite Channel

This paper investigates the renewal properties of the fade and interfade duration processes on a land mobile satellite (LMS) channel and proposes a suitable Markov chain model to reproduce the renewal properties of the original fading channel. The investigated radio link is an L-band terrestrial-satellite channel, measured on board of a moving vehicle on highway; therefore the channel was affected by multipath propagation impairments. In the paper we introduce a novel approach with transforming the analog received power process into a digital fading process in order to characterize the digital fade and interfade duration and calculate their high order statistics. The digital fade and interfade duration process allows determining their renewal properties. To correctly reproduce the renewal property of the fade and interfade duration processes and model them with a Markov chain an appropriate discrete time and discrete state homogenous Markov chain has to be selected. We will show that the three investigated Markov chain models (Gilbert, Gilbert-Elliott and Fritchman) are having different reproducing capability in point of view of the renewal property. Finally, we will propose the most suitable model for the fade and interfade duration process.