Spatial PAPR Reduction in Symbol-level Precoding for the Multi-beam Satellite Downlink

In this work, a novel symbol-level precoding scheme is proposed, for managing the multi-user interference in the forward downlink channel of a multi-beam satellite system. Besides exploiting the constructive interference effect, the proposed scheme aims at improving the robustness of the transmitted signals to the non-linear distortions of practical satellite systems. This is done by reducing the imbalances between the instantaneous power transmitted by the multiple antennas, which are detrimental in non-linear systems. More specifically, this work proposes a symbol-level precoding scheme performing the minimization of the spatial peak-to-average power ratio, under Quality-of-Service constraints. An iterative algorithm is proposed to solve the related optimization problem. Numerical results are presented to assess the performance of the proposed scheme, which outperforms the state of the art symbol-level precoding techniques in terms of spatial peak-to-average power ratio across the transmitting antennas.