How can interference-rejection receivers increase the capacity of CDMA multi-beam satellite communication systems ?

One of the leading approaches in the design of efficient receivers for Code Division Multiple Access radio networks is multi-user/inierference-cancelling detection. It is known that inierference-resilient detection can be seen as a vi able means of increasing the capacity of CDMA transmissions in spite of the presence of asynchronous multiple access interference that limits the performance of standard correlation detectors. At the moment, the main question about interference-resilient receivers is: do they really bring forth the capacity increase they promise on paper, when put at work in a realistic environment? The aim of this paper is to give a preliminary answer to such a question, by studying the case of a mulii-satellite, multi-beam forward link communication network at S-band. Specifically, starting from simplified assumptions on the beam layout, the antenna footprint shape, and the coding multiplexing/modulation scheme, it is shown that a particular interference-cancelling receiver, namely the so-called E-BAID introduced by Honig and Verda [13] and refined by the authors [14], can indeed yield a performance boost to the system quality of service in terms of average outage probability. The results are derived after a mix of theoretical analysis (as far as the detector performance is concerned) and simulation (to examine a number of different random system configurations) to circumvent the inherent complexity of the issue.