Performance analysis of multiuser detection for multibeam satellites under rain fading

Multibeam satellite systems are nowadays widely employed, and their use is expected to grow in the next decades. This has raised the interest for signal processing techniques able to mitigate the interference among beams, since they could enable a much more aggressive spectrum reuse. From an engineering point of view, the system design must consider as an option aggressive frequency reuse patterns, with the need to evaluate the performance of the corresponding interfering canceling techniques for the usual impairments and non-idealities of the satellite link. In this paper, we investigate the effect of a practical impairment of great importance, namely, the attenuation due to the rain, on the performance of a return link which performs MMSE interference canceling. Analytical expressions are derived for a number of performance measures based on the statistical characterization of the rain attenuation.