Performance of terrestrial network with the presence of overlay satellite network

In a hybrid (integrated) satellite-terrestrial system users are provided services seamlessly via a satellite or a terrestrial network. One approach is to design the hybrid network using frequency reuse in a way that satellite spot beams do not overlap the terrestrial network coverage area for the same frequency bandwidth. However, the satellite beams are drifting over time which inevitably causes interference to the terrestrial network. In this paper, another hybrid network approach is studied in which the coverage of the satellite beam fully overlays the terrestrial network coverage. Specially, the performance of the 3GPP long term evolution (LTE) network is studied in a suburban macrocell environment with the presence of interference from overlapping satellite network. Simulation results are provided for base station (BS) intersite distance (ISD) of 3 km and 6 km assuming BS transmission power of 40 W. The bandwidth of 10 MHz was applied for the terrestrial transmission and the bandwidths of 3, 5 and 10 MHz were assumed for the satellite transmission in order to study the partially and fully overlapping cases. The terrestrial network tolerance depends strongly on the network planning issues such as the BS transmission power and the ISD of base stations. For the applied terrestrial network parameters, the system performance degradation due to satellite interference is small.