The Combined Effects of Noise and Multipath Propagation in Multilevel PSK Radio Links

A general analysis of the behavior of multilevel PSK radio links is carried out under multipath propagation conditions. A method is proposed to evaluate system unavailability due to the combined effects of noise and faded channel distortion. The "outage domain," having fixed the transmission channel, is calculated in the space of the variables which characterize any anomalous propagation condition. In particular, with reference to a "twopath model" (a "direct ray" and an "echo"), variations of carrier and symbol synchronisms due to the echo are taken into account and their importance is emphasized in realizing the numerical results. These are shown to be in very good agreement with the experimental ones which have appeared in the literature. An analytical realization of the results obtained is developed and leads to a simple asymptotic formula explaining outage probability as a function of some parameters of the echo statistics, the transmission channel adopted, and the number of modulation levels. Rapid evaluation of this formula allows us to plot outage probability as a function of spectral efficiency, measured in bits/s/Hz.