Ottersten, Björn[University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT) > >]
Jul-2013
Gateway Diversity Strategies in Q/V Band Feeder Links
1384 - 1387
Yes
International
17th Ka and Broadband Communications Conference
3-5 October 2011
Palermo
Italy
[en] A main challenge towards realizing the next generation Terabit/s broadband satellite communications (SatCom) is the limited spectrum available in the Ka band. An attractive solution is to move the feeder link to the higher Q/V band, where more spectrum is available. When utilizing the Q/V band, due to heavy rain attenuation, gateway diversity is considered a necessity to ensure the required feeder link availability. Although receive site diversity has been studied in the past for SatCom, there is much less maturity in terms of transmit diversity techniques. In this paper, a modified switch and stay combining scheme is proposed for a Q/V band feeder link, but its performance is also evaluated over an end-to-end satellite link. The proposed scheme is pragmatic and has close to optimal performance with notably lower complexity.