Interference statistics for multibeam satellites

Third generation mobile satellites will require high-gain multibeam satellites to provide multimedia services. One of the keys to the success of these systems will be their spectral efficiency. In this paper, a method is presented for estimating the cumulative distribution function of the cochannel interference with multibeam satellites for both wideband and narrowband multiple access techniques. Numerical evaluation of the analytical results for various scenarios illustrates the dependence upon the number of spotbearns and the traffic distribution, and suggests appropriate interference mitigating techniques for both. These results are used to show the power-bandwidth efficiency tradeoff for wideband and narrowband techniques for various FEC coding schemes.