Robustness analysis of location-aware channel estimation on multibeam satellite links

A total throughput of about 100 Gbit/s is state-of-the-art for current communication satellite systems. But next generations are envisaged to improve this by a factor of ten, as postulated by the European Space Agency (ESA) in a recent project, identifying multibeam architectures in combination with an aggressive reuse of frequency bands as crucial enabler technologies. Interference problems, related to this approach, could be mitigated by (joint) precoding and beamforming on the forward link and multi-user detection on the return link. However, these methods necessitate accurate and timely information upon the channel state. In this context, just by exploiting the a priori knowledge about the antenna characteristics and the user terminal position, a novel strategy called location-aware channel estimation (LACE) was published recently; promising results in terms of accuracy and throughput were achieved in this context. The current paper examines and demonstrates the robustness of the LACE concept in case the user position is not perfectly known.