Future satellite communication systems will be developed at Ka-band (20/30 GHz) owing to the relatively wide frequency allocation and current freedom From terrestrial interference for multimedia services. A serious disadvantage of the Ka-band, however, is the very high atmospheric attenuation in rainy weather. Quasi-synchronous CDMA drastically reduces the effect of self-noise with several interesting Features of CDMA For mobile communications such as flexible frequency reuse, the capability of performing, soft-handover and a lower sensitivity to interference. This paper evaluates the performance of a quasi-synchronous CDMA return link for a Ka-band geostationary satellite communication system. For a fixed satellite channel whose characteristics depend on weather conditions, the signal envelope and phase for this channel is modeled as Gaussian. The bit error and outage probability, and the detection loss due to imperfect chip timing synchronization is analytically evaluated and the system capacity degradation due to the weather condition is estimated. Two cases of general and worst conditions are evaluated, in which i) rain attenuation ii) nonlinearity of transponder are considered. The two cases consist of the general case in which all users are affected by rainy weather, and the worst case in which only the user of interest, not multiple access interferers, is affected by rain attenuation. The results for the two cases of rainy weather clearly show that quasi-synchronous CDMA eases the power control requirements and has less sensitivity to imperfect power control. When dealing with the impact of the satellite transponder nonlinearity in addition to the rain attenuation, the shift of optimum amplifier operating point is shown so that [E-b/N-0](sat), defined as the sum of the E-b/N-0 value required to obtain a BER equal to Pb at a given output backoff (OBO) and the value of the OBO itself, tends to decrease. and higher BER impairment is given, since the rain attenuation results in the same effect as the additive input backoff (IBO) at the satellite transponder input. As the BER increases, the optimum [E-b/N-0](sat) and IBO decrease that result in the shift of optimum operating point.
