Performance Analysis of a CDMA VSAT System with Convolutional and Reed-Solomon Coding

The purpose of this thesis is to model a satellite communication system with VSATs, using Spread Spectrum CDMA methods and Forward Error Correction (FEC). Walsh codes and PN sequences are used to generate a CDMA system and FEC is used to further improve the performance. Convolutional and block coding methods are examined and the results are obtained for each different case, including concatenated use of the codes. The performance of the system is given in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER). As observed from the results, the performance is mainly affected by the number of users and the code rates.