In the present work, a multibeam satellite that employs aggressive frequency
reuse towards increasing the offered throughput is considered. Focusing on the
forward link, the goal is to employ multi-antenna signal processing techniques,
namely linear precoding, to manage the inter-beam interferences. In this
context, fundamental practical limitations, namely the rigid framing structure
of satellite communication standards and the on-board per-antenna power
constraints, are herein considered. Therefore, the concept of optimal frame
based precoding under per-antenna constraints, is discussed. This consists in
precoding the transmit signals without changing the underlying framing
structure of the communication standard. In the present work, the connection of
the frame based precoding problem with the generic signal processing problem of
conveying independent sets of common data to distinct groups of users is
established. This model is known as physical layer multicasting to multiple
co-channel groups. Building on recent results, the weighted fair per-antenna
power constrained multigroup multicast precoders are employed for frame based
precoding. The throughput performance of these solutions is compared to
multicast aware heuristic precoding methods over a realistic multibeam
satellite scenario. Consequently, the gains of the proposed approach are
quantified via extensive numerical results.Comment: Accepted for presentation at the IEEE ASMS 201
