Linear and nonlinear techniques for multibeam joint processing in satellite communications

Existing satellite communication standards such as DVB-S2, operate under highly-efficient adaptive coding and modulation schemes thus making significant progress in improving the spectral efficiencies of digital satellite broadcast systems. However, the constantly increasing demand for broadband and interactive satellite links emanates the need to apply novel interference mitigation techniques, striving towards Terabit throughput. In this direction, the objective of the present contribution is to investigate joint multiuser processing techniques for multibeam satellite systems. In the forward link, the performance of linear precoding is investigated with optimal nonlinear precoding (i.e., dirty article coding) acting as the upper performance limit. To this end, the resulting power and precoder design problems are approached through optimization methods. Similarly, in the return link the concept of linear filtering (i.e., linear minimum mean square error) is studied with the optimal successive interference cancelation acting as the performance limit. The derived capacity curves for both scenarios are compared to conventional satellite systems where beams are processed independently and interbeam interference is mitigated through a four color frequency reuse scheme, in order to quantify the potential gain of the proposed techniques.