DVB-S2 spectrum efficiency improvement with hierarchical modulation

We study the design of a DVB-S2 system in order to maximise spectrum efficiency. This task is usually challenging due to channel variability. Modern satellite communications systems such as DVB-SH and DVB-S2 rely mainly on a time sharing strategy to optimise the spectrum efficiency. Recently, we showed that combining time sharing with hierarchical modulation can provide significant gains (in terms of spectrum efficiency) compared to the best time sharing strategy. However, our previous design does not improve the DVB-S2 performance when all the receivers experience low or large signal-to-noise ratios. In this article, we introduce and study a hierarchical QPSK and a hierarchical 32-APSK to overcome the previous limitations. We show in a realistic case based on DVB-S2 that the hierarchical QPSK provides an improvement when the receivers experience poor channel condition, while the 32-APSK increases the spectrum efficiency when the receivers experience good channel condition.