A terabit/second satellite system for European broadband access: a feasibility study

This paper presents a feasibility study for a fixed broadband access High Throughput Satellite terabit/second system by considering appropriate state-of-the-art communication technologies. For the investigated system model, DVB-S2 and DVB-RCS2 are assumed as the air interfaces for the forward and return link, respectively. The performance of DVB-S2 and DVB-RCS2 Adaptive Coding and Modulation is examined along with potential extensions of these standards. For example, the performance of very low rate DVB-RCS turbo codes are investigated and their performance is evaluated. In addition, a performance comparison for M-ary (M=16, 32, 64) constellations in the presence of a linear and a high power amplifier non-linear channel is carried out. Various frequency reuse schemes and different antenna models are also considered, and their performance is analyzed and evaluated. It is demonstrated that, by using the Q/V (40/50 GHz) bands for the gateways and the Ka (20-30 GHz) band for the user terminals, around 20 gateways and 200 beams are required to provide with the proposed satellite system terabit/second capacity. The obtained performance evaluation results have shown that the forward link is limited by noise rather than interference, whereas the return link is interference limited. Additionally, some further aspects of the system design in relation with the total number of gateways and the payload are discussed. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.