Abstract
In this paper, we investigate and compare the performance of the IEEE mobile WiMAX and the 3GPP LTE terrestrial air interfaces over GEO satellite links with amplifier nonlinearity and mobile wideband fading, in order to have an insight into which would be a better candidate for ubiquitous mobile broadband delivery. Both air-interfaces are compared in terms of achievable single-link capacities for a 5MHz channel. Link-level computer simulations are also carried out to establish their block-error-rate performance. Although both standards share a lot of similarity, simulation results show that they can differ in performance as a result of their subcarrier multiplexing schemes and the variants of OFDMA implemented. © 2010 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. All rights reserved.