Spatial interference cancellation techniques for Mobile Satellite Systems

Mobile Satellite Systems (MSS) are becoming an increasingly important part of the global communication infrastructure, cooperating with and complementing the existing terrestrial facilities. In multi-beam satellite networks, inter-beam interference is a limiting factor for the increase of system capacity. By exploiting the knowledge of the antenna pattern at the gateway, the interbeam interference can be reduced by adopting Multi User Detection (MUD) techniques. In this paper, we assess the applicability of MUD techniques to multi-beam mobile satellite systems based on the GMR-1 standard, proposing viable estimation strategies and assessing the robustness of the proposed techniques to non linear distortion and mobile propagation conditions. Large gains are demonstrated, paving the way for the adoption of full frequency reuse in high traffic beam clusters.