Ergodic Capacity of High Throughput Satellite Systems With Mixed FSO-RF Transmission

Abstract: We study a high throughput satellite system, where the feeder link uses free-space optical (FSO) and the user link uses radio frequency (RF) communication. In particular, we first propose a transmit diversity using Alamouti space time block coding to mitigate the atmospheric turbulence in the feeder link. Then, based on the concept of average virtual signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio and one-bit feedback, we propose a beamforming algorithm for the user link to maximize the ergodic capacity (EC). Moreover, by assuming that the FSO links follow the Malaga distribution whereas RF links undergo the shadowed-Rician fading, we derive a closed-form EC expression of the considered system. Finally, numerical simulations validate the accuracy of our theoretical analysis, and show that the proposed schemes can achieve higher capacity compared with the reference schemes.