Wireless wideband DS-CDMA point-to-multipoint system for distance education services.

Abstract

A review of possible distance education services is given. These services range from narrowband to broadband, from real to non-real time and from broadcast to fully interactive services. The service target groups include the rural schools and communities who are scattered in remote areas. The performances of multiple access techniques, FDMA, TDMA and CDMA when in use for the provision of point-to-multipoint multimedia services is compared. A hybrid of the satellite and terrestrial access networks for the implementation of the distance education services is presented. The feasibility of implementing the proposed satellite network as part of the total network using the FDMA technique is presented. The rest of the work done in the thesis concentrates on the terrestrial network. The terrestrial part of the network is based on fixed cellular DS-CDMA techniques. The fixed cellular network's specifications, modeling and a discussion of the capacity, BER performance, bandwidth requirements and coverage are presented. The link budget estimation of the performance is given. Lastly a review of propagation characteristics for a terrestrial rural environment and a review of DS-CDMA concepts are presented in the appendix.