System analysis of smart gateways techniques applied to Q/V-band high throughput satellites

Abstract

The future generation of High Throughput Satellite (HTS) for broadband distributed user access is strictly connected to the use of Ka-band and beyond frequencies. This is related to the requirement of reaching the so-called "terabit connectivity" to support the increasing bit rate requirements. In order to reach the terabit connectivity target, an important breakthrough is needed in terms of bandwidth availability, hence the use of "beyond Ka-band" frequencies is mandatory to dispose of a larger spectrum. As a matter of fact HTS are bandwidth limited; hence, to reach a very high throughput, bandwidth efficient modulation and coding schemes have to be used. These schemes require satellite resources, as DC power, that are precious and limited. On the other hand, it is well known that the atmospheric propagation impairments at Extremely High Frequency (EHF) bands (30-300 GHz) are severe, in particular when rain events occur; a viable solution is the use of propagation impairments mitigation techniques (PIMTs) which have to be analyzed and properly tuned in order to realize an efficient transmission. This paper is focused on the performance analysis of the smart gateway (SG) PIMT which foresees to redistribute the traffic from the impaired gateway to the other gateways not affected by heavy rain conditions.