American Journal of Mobile Systems, Applications and Services Vol. 1, No. 1, 2015, pp. 46-53 http://www.aiscience.org/journal/ajmsas * Corresponding author E-mail address: jayyomi@yahoo.com (O. Aboderin) Modeling Land Mobile Satellite Channel and Mitigation of Signal Fading Oluyomi Aboderin 1, * , Isiaka A. Alimi 2 1 Department of Engineering and Space Systems, National Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA), Abuja, Nigeria 2 Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, School of Engineering and Engineering Technology, Federal University of Technology, Akure, Nigeria Abstract Land mobile satellite (LMS) is an important aspect of satellite communication to everyone across the globe due to the services available through it. To this effect, modeling the channel in this services is also very important, so as to ensure availability, quality of service (QoS), and reduce outages on the channel, which in turn will results into value for money, safety of lives and properties, and even reduce cost both from the operator’s point of view and user’s point of view. In this work, a Lutz two-state statistical model was used to model the behavior of a complete channel in two different transmission environments namely: shadowing and un-shadowing or line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-sight (NLOS) conditions. However due to the influence of the propagation environment on the LMS signals, there were outages (fading) along the 200meters length of the measurement campaign. To reduce these outages, satellite diversity technique was employed. This technique pair together two satellites having the same masking angle and both simultaneously linked with the mobile terminal. The results show that connectivity to the two satellites improved the satellites availability to the mobile terminal up to 90%, and the service quality also was improved. Keywords Land Mobile Satellite (LMS), Channel, Lutz Two-State Statistical Model, Shadowing, Unshadowing, Line-of-Sight (LOS), Non-Line-of-Sight (NLOS), Mobile Terminal Received: June 12, 2015 / Accepted: July 3, 2015 / Published online: July 22, 2015 @ 2015 The Authors. Published by American Institute of Science. This Open Access article is under the CC BY-NC license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ 1. Introduction In today’s growing world of modern technology, satellite communication has taken a driver seat as one of the most reliable source of communication in almost every part of the World. The usefulness of satellite communication covers a great while in the communication systems. Apart from providing communication across a geographically separated great distances, giving opportunity for life transmission and reception of programs (Sport competition) or life-monitoring of events, it has also been a source of reaching areas ravaged by natural disasters (Earthquake, Tsunami, deadly erosions) and even war ravaged areas, as well as weather forecast, which is very important for travelers either through aviation, maritime and road transportation industries. Land Mobile Satellite (LMS) communications gives the seamless communication between a satellite in space and a number of mobile remote terminals, or mobile devices on the earth surface. Channel on the other hand is the space between a transmitter and a receiver. It is needful to say that LMS channel possess the properties of the mobile and satellite channel which include multipath effect, Doppler shift and fading. The important part of modeling LMS channel is to ensure better QoS which in turn will ensure proper