Sub-Block Level Interference Exploitation Precoding in Satellite Communications

While symbol-level (SL) precoders have been shown to improve transmission performance by treating multi-user interference (MUI) as a useful resource, the SL precoders only employ uniform modulation for all downlink users, and the incurred complexity increases linearly with the block length. In this letter, we investigate the possibility of mixed-modulations interference exploitation (IE) for satellite communications, at a sub-block level. By exploiting the specific detection regions of constellation points of different modulations, a novel sub-block level mixed-modulation (BL-MIE) design is proposed, guaranteeing that MUI is always constructive in each sub-block duration, regardless of the users’ heterogeneous modulation schemes. Compared to the classic SL design, it is proved that the BL-MIE provides complexity reduction on the order of square root of the sub-block length, i.e., ${\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{n})$, with n denoting the number of symbols per sub-block. Hence, it well strikes the balance between the performance and complexity. Simulation demonstrates that the proposed designs significantly outperform the benchmarks in terms of power consumption and throughput performance.