MIMO Feeder Links for High Throughput Satellites

Abstract

Feeder links have become one of the main bottlenecks in the design of high throughput satellite systems. To support more than 1 Tbit/s of sum data rate, several tens of spatially separated feeder beams in the Q/V-band must be deployed. Meanwhile, their angular separation is limited by geographical constraints, and interbeam interference becomes a performance limiting factor. Moreover, strong rain fades affect the links' availability. In this work, a MIMO-based smart gateway architecture is introduced to address these challenges. This solution allows to halve the number of required feeder beams and also improves the robustness against rain fades. The potential of the approach is demonstrated in terms of system outage probability for a realistic scenario with 25 active and 2 redundant MIMO feeder beams distributed in Europe.