Onboard Beam Generation for Multibeam Satellite Systems
Abstract: This paper aims at designing an onboard beam generation process for a hybrid onboard on-ground ground multibeam satellite architecture. The proposed method offers a good tradeoff between total throughput and feeder link bandwidth requirements compared with pure on-ground on ground systems. Full frequency reuse among beams is considered, and the beamforming at the satellite is i designed for supporting interference mitigation techniques. In addition, in order to reduce the payload cost and complexity, this onboard beamforming is assumed to be constant and the same for forward and return link transmissions so that the same array-fed fed reflector can be used for forward and return links, leading to a substantial reduction of the payload mass. To meet all these requirements, a novel robust minimum mean square error optimization is conceived. The benefits of the considered scheme are ev evaluated aluated with respect to the current approaches both analytically and numerically. Indeed, we show that with the DVB-RCS DVB and DVB-S2 S2 standards, our proposal allows increasing the total throughput within a range between 6% and 15% with respect to other onboard onboard processing techniques in the return and forward link, respectively.