Increasing the feeder link efficiency in broadband satellite systems

In this paper we investigate on signal processing techniques to reduce the bandwidth of the feeder link of a high throughput satellite communication system. On the one hand, conventional transparent satellites are severely constrained by the available bandwidth for the feeder link, while, on the other hand, regenerative satellites require a very large on-board computational effort. An interesting alternative approach is to perform aboard the satellite a digital transparent processing to reduce the redundancy of the signals before transmitting them on the feeder link, hence improving the spectral efficiency of the feeder link with respect to a transparent satellite, while reducing at the same time the associated computational effort with respect to a regenerative satellite. Our results show that the signal occupancy on the feeder link can be effectively reduced, and this positively impacts the number of beams served by a given ground station, hence on the number of required ground stations for a multi-beam system with a large number of beams.