Gateway Switching in Q/V Band Satellite Feeder Links

TL;DR

This paper proposes a practical switch and stay combining scheme for Q/V band satellite feeder links, addressing rain attenuation challenges and enhancing link availability with low complexity.

Contribution

It introduces a modified switch and stay combining method tailored for Q/V band SatCom, with performance evaluation over an end-to-end satellite link.

Findings

Close to optimal performance achieved

Lower complexity compared to existing methods

Effective mitigation of rain attenuation effects

Abstract

A main challenge towards realizing the next generation Terabit/s broadband satellite communications (SatCom) is the limited spectrum available in the Ka band. An attractive solution is to move the feeder link to the higher Q/V band, where more spectrum is available. When utilizing the Q/V band, due to heavy rain attenuation, gateway diversity is considered a necessity to ensure the required feeder link availability. Although receive site diversity has been studied in the past for SatCom, there is much less maturity in terms of transmit diversity techniques. In this paper, a modified switch and stay combining scheme is proposed for a Q/V band feeder link, but its performance is also evaluated over an end-to-end satellite link. The proposed scheme is pragmatic and has close to optimal performance with notably lower complexity.