Increasing GMR-1 System Throughput with Turbo Interference Cancellation Techniques

In recent years, mobile satellite systems (MSS) are acquiring a crucial role in the telecommunication arena, complementing and cooperating with their terrestrial counterparts. Due to the ever increasing demand for both voice and data traffic, the necessity to extend the current system capacity is becoming more and more stringent. One of the main issues for high loaded systems is the presence of severe intra-system interference in the uplink segment. This requires to design smart detection techniques able to eliminate and even constructively exploit the contribution of interference, with the aim of guarantee high QoS to a larger number of users. In particular, the study of multi user detection (MUD) techniques is attracting great interest, but their practical application to satellite systems still has to be proved. In this framework, the goal of the paper is to quantify the potential system throughput increase due to the introduction of turbo spatial minimum mean squared error-interference cancellation (turbo SMMSE-IC) to the GMR-1 satellite system. To this aim, the potential performance improvement with respect to traditional single user detection schemes has been evaluated by physical layer simulations in realistic scenarios. Then, the results have been taken as an input for a detailed link budget analysis, devoted to compute the corresponding system throughput increase. The feasibility to adopt full frequency reuse within a selected number of high traffic beams thanks to the proposed MUD technique is finally proved