MIMO Feeder Links for High Throughput Satellites

Feeder links have become one of the main bottlenecks in the design of high throughput satellite systems. To support more than 1 Tbit/s of sum data rate, several tens of spatially separated feeder beams in the Q/V-band must be deployed. Meanwhile, their angular separation is limited by geographical constraints, and interbeam interference becomes a performance limiting factor. In this work, a MIMO-based gateway architecture is introduced to address this challenge. This solution allows to halve the number of spatially separated feeder beams. The potential of the approach is demonstrated in terms of carrier to interference ratio for scenarios with 15 multiple-inputmultiple- output (MIMO) feeder links distributed in Europe.