System Performance of an Advanced Multi-User Detection Technique for High Throughput Satellite Systems

The growing demand for high rate broadband satellite services delivered through multi-spot beam systems pushes more and more for spectrum re-usage over the coverage. In this context, due to the non-perfect isolation among the beams, the amount of interference coming from the side-lobes of the co-channel spots may significantly impact the link budget and thus ultimately the achievable throughput. Co-channel interference becomes therefore one of the main impairments limiting the performance of the system if not properly tackled. In this paper we focus on the forward communication link and assess the benefits at system performance level that can be obtained applying an advanced interference cancellation technique based on Multi-User Detection (MUD) at the terminal receiver side. By applying a joint detection and separate decoding on the main signal and on the interfering signal we show that the peak data-rate of each user can be significantly increased with respect to a conventional network using a four colour scheme and that the use of aggressive frequency re-use scheme is possible.