Extremely High Frequency (EHF) Bands for Future Broadcast Satellite Services: Opportunities and Challenges

The exploitation of the bandwidth portions in the millimeter wave domain, namely extremely high frequencies (EHFs) will open new perspectives to future satellite services, in particular for high quality TV broadcasting and multimedia content delivery. The present work aims at surveying the opportunities and challenges of EHF exploitation for broadband satellite applications in the broadcast framework. Theoretical capacity evaluation confirms that EHF satellite links can offer unprecedented data-rates, clearly superior than that actually provided by Ku and Ka-bands. However, some crucial issues are still to be solved, mainly in terms of mitigation of tropospheric propagation impairments and appropriate waveform design. Link and capacity analysis will be the basis for the investigation of future application scenarios of broadcast EHF satcoms, namely high-definition TV (HDTV) and ultra-HDTV, with particular emphasis to 4K and 8K video formats.