Per-antenna Power Minimization in Symbol-level Precoding for the Multi-beam Satellite Downlink

This paper addresses the problem of multi-user interference in the forward downlink channel of a multi-beam satellite system. A symbol-level precoding scheme is considered, in order to exploit the multi-user interference and transform it into useful power at the receiver side, through a joint utilization of the data information and the channel state information. In this context, a per-antenna power minimization scheme is proposed, under Quality-of-Service constraints, for multi-level modulation schemes. The consideration of the power limitations individually for each transmitting RF chain is a central aspect of this work, and it allows to deal with systems using separate per-antenna amplifiers. Moreover, this feature is also particularly relevant for systems suffering non-linear effects of the channel. This is the case of satellite systems, where the non-linear amplifiers should be properly driven in order to reduce the detrimental saturation effect. In the proposed scheme, the transmitted signals are designed in order to reduce the power peaks, while guaranteeing some specific target signal-to-noise ratios at the receivers. Numerical results are presented in order to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, which is compared both to the state of the art in symbol-level precoding and to the conventional MMSE precoding approach.