On-Board Beam Generation for Multibeam Satellite Systems

Abstract: This paper aims at designing an on-board beam generation process for multibeam satellite systems with the goal of reducing the traffic at the feeder link. Full frequency reuse among beams is considered and the beamforming at the satellite is designed for supporting interference mitigation techniques. In addition, in order to reduce the payload cost and complexity, this on-board processing is assumed to be constant and the same for forward and return link transmissions. To meet all these requirements a novel robust minimum mean square error (MMSE) optimization is conceived. The benefits of the considered scheme are evaluated with respect to the current approaches both analytically and numerically. Indeed, we show that with the DVB-RCS and DVB-S2 standards, our proposal allows to increase the total throughput within a range between 6\% and 15\% with respect to other on-board processing techniques in the return and forward link, respectively. Furthermore, the proposed solution presents an implicit feeder link bandwidth reduction with respect to the on-ground beam generation process.