In this paper, a novel pilot-symbol-aided (PSA) technique is proposed for fading estimation in the land mobile satellite fading channels. The proposed technique combines the fading estimates obtained from a bandwidth-efficient technique and a conventional technique according to the signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) of the fading estimates. To enhance the transmission quality, trellis-coded modulation (TCM) and diversity reception are employed in the system, and the combined estimates are subsequently used to correct the channel fading effects, to weight the signals from different diversity branches, and to provide channel state information of the Viterbi decoder. Monte Carlo computer simulation has been used to study the bit-error-rate (BER) performance of the proposed technique on trellis-coded 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation in the frequency non-selective Rician fading channels. Results have shown that the proposed PSA technique requires a very low bandwidth redundancy to provide satisfactory BER performance at low SNRs, and thus is suitable for use with TCM and diversity reception to achieve both bandwidth and power-efficient transmission.
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