Capacity of the Multiple Spot Beam Satellite Channel With Rician Fading

Abstract

In this correspondence, the uplink of a multibeam satellite system with Rician fading is analyzed under the framework of Wyner's Gaussian cellular multiple access channel. In this framework the received signal at a given multibeam antenna is the sum of signals transmitted by users within that beam's cell area plus a factor 0 les alpha les 1 times the sum of the signals transmitted by users from adjacent cells plus ambient Gaussian noise. Both one-dimensional (1-D) linear, and 2-D hexagonal cellular arrangements are considered. In addition, we consider a modified version of the 1-D linear arrangement whereby users from cells further than adjacent cells contribute to intercell interference. It is assumed that the distance between the antenna elements is small compared to the distance between a user and the satellite. Thus when fading is present, a particular user's fading coefficient is the same at each multibeam antenna. This is the fundamental difference between the multibeam satellite fading channel and the terrestrial cellular fading channel, in which each user experiences independent fading at each base station. Using a Haar measure approximation we derive closed form approximations for the capacity of the satellite fading channel for the scenarios when optimal joint decoding and linear minimum mean square error filtering is employed at the ground station. These approximations are shown to be in close agreement to Monte Carlo simulation results for large dimensional systems. It is shown that fading causes a loss in capacity compared to the nonfading channel. Furthermore, at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) this loss is independent of the intercell interference and topology of the system, but is dependent on the distribution of the fading coefficients and the number of users per beam.