Performance of a combined dynamic rate adaptation and adaptive coding modulation technique for a DVB-RCS2 system

The growing demand for two-way broadband satellite services has pushed for the development of the DVB-RCS2 standard to improve the performance of the reverse link. Among the enhancements brought by the new standard, a wide range of modulation and coding schemes allows Interference and Fading Mitigation Techniques (IFMTs) to more efficiently exploit the diverse temporal and geographical propagation channel attenuations. In addition, the rich intra-system interference environment typical of large multi-spot beam network with high frequency re-use, and the constraints on the desired user QoS, call for a clever combination of different techniques. However, the effective implementation of the techniques is not trivial and the consequent benefits require the exploitation of complex computer-based system simulation tools. In this paper we compare the performance obtained for a DVB-RCS2 system using Adaptive Coding and Modulation (ACM) with those ones achieved by combining Dynamic Rate Adaptation (DRA) and ACM. The considered reference system is ka-band multi-spot beam network, which is deemed to follow within the next few years the current generation of ka-band HTS (High Throughput Satellites) networks.