Multi-User Detection in Multibeam Mobile Satellite Systems: A Fair Performance Evaluation

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the spectral efficiency of multi-user detection in multibeam satellite systems, comparing it fairly to conventional systems under realistic constraints and analyzing how system parameters affect performance.

Contribution

It provides a fair performance comparison of multibeam MUD and conventional systems considering real implementation constraints and payload resource usage.

Findings

Multibeam MUD achieves higher spectral efficiency than conventional systems.

Performance scales with system parameters as described by analytical formulas.

Fair comparison is possible under equal payload resource constraints.

Abstract

Multi-User Detection (MUD) techniques are currently being examined as promising technologies for the next generation of broadband, interactive, multibeam, satellite communication (SatCom) systems. Results in the existing literature have shown that when full frequency and polarization reuse is employed and user signals are jointly processed at the gateway, more than threefold gains in terms of spectral efficiency over conventional systems can be obtained. However, the information theoretic results for the capacity of the multibeam satellite channel, are given under ideal assumptions, disregarding the implementation constraints of such an approach. Considering a real system implementation, the adoption of full resource reuse is bound to increase the payload complexity and power consumption. Since the novel techniques require extra payload resources, fairness issues in the comparison among the two approaches arise. The present contribution evaluates in a fair manner, the performance of the return link (RL) of a SatCom system serving mobile users that are jointly decoded at the receiver. More specifically, the achievable spectral efficiency of the assumed system is compared to a conventional system under the constraint of equal physical layer resource utilization. Furthermore, realistic link budgets for the RL of mobile SatComs are presented, thus allowing the comparison of the systems in terms of achievable throughput. Since the proposed systems operate under the same payload requirements as the conventional systems, the comparison can be regarded as fair. Finally, existing analytical formulas are also employed to provide closed form descriptions of the performance of clustered multibeam MUD, thus introducing insights on how the performance scales with respect to the system parameters.