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. © 2015 IEEE.