Feasibility Study of Full-duplex Relaying in Satellite Networks

With the successful implementation of full-duplex radio
prototypes, traditional orthogonal half-duplex communications is deemed
to be inefficient in certain terrestrial applications. While full-duplex
techniques are gaining interest in terrestrial communications, thanks to
the trend of short-distance and low-power transmissions, their application
to satellite communications has drawn little attention. Motivated by this,
the paper explores the use of the full-duplex relaying operation on-board
the satellite in a DVB-S2 compliant network. Self-interference, whose
management is the key component of a full-duplex communication, is
the focus of study in this paper. Modelling the effects of self-interference
and power amplifier nonlinearities on the quality of the received signal
in undertaken. Subsequently, closed-form expressions for the various
interference components are derived. The numerical evaluations of
derived expressions rely on realistic link budgets and indicate substantial
gains in spectral efficiency when self-interference can be well calibrated
and measured. This confirms that the satellite full-duplex communications
could be a promising solution for the efficient use of satellite spectrum,
at least from a technical point of view.