We study the applicability of soft interference cancelation in the forward link of multibeam satellite systems with focus on mobile terminals. We adopt a standard currently used in commercial satellite systems as a reference. The multibeam satellite antenna radiation diagram has been generated using a physical optics re¿ector model while a widely adopted channel model has been used for the land mobile satellite channel. The interference pattern has been derived using a system simulator developed by the European Space Agency. Starting from the analysis of the interference pattern, we study the application of a low-complexity soft interference cancelation scheme for commercial applications. Our results show that, under realistic conditions, a two-colors frequency reuse scheme can be employed while guaranteeing service availability across the coverage and keeping the complexity at the user terminals relatively low.

Peer Reviewed