We study the applicability of soft interference cancellation in the forward link of commercial 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 reflector model, while state-ofthe art channel models have been used for the land mobile satellite (LMS) channel. The interference pattern has been derived through a system simulator developed by the European Space Agency (ESA). Starting from the analysis of the interference pattern we study the application of a low complexity soft interference cancellation scheme. Our results show that, under realistic interference and propagation conditions and for existing standards, 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