The transmission capacity of multibeam communication satellites

The transmission capacity which can be provided by a geosynchronous multiple-beam satellite employing frequency reuse is studied. Like all communication channels, satellite capacity is limited by available power, transmission bandwidth, and noise. In addition, factors peculiar to satellite links include cochannel interference among neighboring beams, channel nonlinearity, nonuniformly distributed traffic, and for satellites operating at frequencies above 10-GHz, rain attenuation. The effects of these factors upon the capacity of a satellite system are examined in detail. Results for a 12/14-GHz system with assumed satellite parameters compatible with a space shuttle launch and small 5 m earth station antennas show that a capacity of about 30 Gbit/s can be provided if the unavailability due to rain outage is no greater than 0.1 percent, and that about 10 Gbit/s can be provided for an unavailability no greater than 0.01 percent. Efficient utilization of the geosynchronous arc is also explored, and current trends in communication satellites are discussed.