Subset Precoding and Tapering on Phased Arrays for High Throughput Satellite Systems

Beamforming with phased arrays gained popularity for the design of new high throughput satellite (HTS) systems. In contrast to horn antenna arrays, they clearly offer more flexibility in space and provide the possibility to reduce interference while still aiming for full frequency re-use on ground. Often, tapering is also used for these antennas to control the side lobe level. In this work, we apply the traditional beam precoding, as interference mitigation scheme on ground along with tapering in the forward link and determine possible options for the reduction of computational complexity by subset precoding. The performance evaluation is executed on a direct radiating array and an array fed reflector antenna. Apart from additive white Gaussian noise, also an adaptive coding and modulation margin and channel state information error are considered to create realistic channel conditions.