MIMO Processing for Satellites in the 5G Era

The integration of satellites in 5G networks is considered to complement terrestrial infrastructures and offer the availability and the data rates fulfilling the demands of future communication systems. This paradigm shift especially brings new challenges for the design of very high throughput satellites. In this work, the interest of the MIMO technology to meet 5G availability and data rate requirements with advanced digital satellite payloads is discussed. The advantages of the approach both for the feeder links and the user links of next-generation systems are presented.