Precoding for Satellite Communications: Why, How and What next?

TL;DR

This paper discusses the importance, methods, and future directions of precoding in satellite communications to enhance spectral efficiency and manage interference across various system configurations.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the motivation, theoretical development, and future research avenues for precoding in satellite systems.

Findings

Precoding reduces interference and improves spectral efficiency in satellite systems.

Various precoder design methodologies are tailored to different satellite configurations.

Future research directions include advanced precoding techniques for emerging satellite networks.

Abstract

Precoding has stood out as a promising multi-user transmission technique to meet the emerging throughput demand of satellite communication systems while awaiting the technological maturity for exploiting higher bands. Precoding enables the reduction of interference among co-channel beams through spatial processing while promoting aggressive frequency reuse and improving spectral efficiency. Satellite systems offer multitude of system and service configurations, resulting in different precoder design methodologies. This article explores the motivation for the introduction of precoding, offers an insight to their theoretical development in a diverse scenarios and presents some avenues for future development.