Performance Analysis of High Throughput Satellite Systems with Optical Feeder Links

Abstract

In this paper, we present the performance analysis of a multibeam high throughput satellite (HTS) system with optical feeder link. We consider the forward link, or downlink, with a fixed gain transparent satellite payload, where the optical feeder link, i.e. the link between gateway and satellite, is impaired by turbulence fading and the RF user link, i.e. the link between satellite and user terminals, is degraded by rain fading. In multibeam HTS systems, frequency re-use in the user link creates interbeam interference which needs to be mitigated to avoid performance degradation. For this purpose, we consider our recently proposed novel zero-forcing (ZF) precoder that does not require channel state information at the gateway and compare its performance with the conventional ZF precoder. We derive statistics of the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio to approximate performance measures including outage probability, average bit error rate and ergodic capacity. These approximations provide valuable insights into the system analysis. Monte Carlo simulations are used to validate the accuracy of our analysis.