Carrier Aggregation in Satellite Communications: Impact and Performance Study

Carrier Aggregation (CA) is an integral part of current cellular networks. Its ability to enhance the peak data rate, to efficiently utilize the limited available spectrum resources and to satisfy the demand for data-hungry applications has drawn large attention from different wireless network communities. Given the benefits of CA in the terrestrial wireless environment, it is of great interest to analyze and evaluate the potential impact of CA in the satellite domain. In this article, we provide a brief introduction to the possible CA configurations, their deployment scenarios/use cases as well as their advantages, disadvantages, and challenges. Next, the problem of multiuser aggregation and access control design for CA in multi-beam high throughput satellite systems under practical system constraints is presented. In particular, we propose an efficient CA design solution that gives the optimal carrier-user assignment along with the percentage that each user exploits each carrier assuming that multiple users can be multiplexed in each carrier. Both inter-transponder and intra-transponder CA at the satellite payload level of the communication stack are considered. We propose a flexible carrier allocation approach for a CA-enabled multi-beam satellite system targeting a proportionally fair user demand satisfaction. Simulation results and analysis shed some light on this rather unexplored scenario and demonstrate the feasibility of the CA in satellite communication systems.