Robust Precoding and Beamforming in a Multiple Gateway Multibeam Satellite System

This paper aims to design joint precoding and onboard beamforming at a multiple gateway multibeam satellite system. Full frequency reuse pattern is considered among the beams and each gateway serves a cluster of adjacent beams such that multiple clusters are served through a set of gateways. However, two issues are required to be addressed. First, the interference in both user and feeder links is the bottleneck of the whole system and employing interference mitigation techniques is essential. Second, as the data demand increases, the ground and space segments should employ extensive bandwidth resources in the feeder link accordingly. This entails embedding an extra number of gateways aiming to support a fair balance between the increasing demand and the corresponding required feeder link resources. To tackle these problems, this paper studies the impact of employing a joint multiple gateway architecture and on-board beamforming scheme. It is shown that by properly designing the on-board beamforming scheme, the number of gateways can be kept affordable even if the data demand increases. The proposed beamforming scheme can partially mitigate the interference in the user link. While the user and feeder link channels vary over time, this paper focuses on designing fixed beamforming which is sufficiently robust to the variations in both channels, leading to keep payload complexity low. Moreover, Zero Forcing precoding technique is employed at the gateways to reject the interference in the feeder links as well as it helps the proposed fixed on-board beamforming by partially equalizing the interference in user link.