A FREQUENCY EFFICIENCY AND FLEXIBILITY AUGMENTED MULTI-BEAM MOBILE SATELLITE TRANSPONDER SYSTEM

This paper proposes a multi-beam satellite transponder configuration, which can achieve high frequency efficiency for the mobile satellite system with limited frequency resources. The multi-beam system is one of the effective approaches to enhance the frequency utilization efficiency because of its frequency reuse capability among separate beams. However, in order to employ the multi-beam concept effectively for the mobile satellite communication systems, the satellite transponder should have power and channel handling flexibility to correspond to the dynamically changed communication traffic conditions. In the conventional approaches, either sacrifice of the feeder-link frequency efficiency or increase of the system cost was required to integrate the power and channel handling flexibility. The proposed method is an alternative to realize an effective frequency usage in mobile system, which is constituted by two ideas such as frequency block switching and air-link polarity segregation. The system architecture and feasibility study are presented.