On transmission modes subset selection in DVB-S2/RCS satellite systems

For satellite systems offering broadband and telecom services at Ka band frequencies and above Fade Mitigation Techniques (FMT), in particular Adaptive Modulation and Coding (ACM), are essential to improve the system capacity. One of the important aspects of ACM from a physical and MAC layer perspective is the choice of transmission modes to be used during the system operation that would achieve the optimal trade-off between the system complexity and performance. This paper deals with one such methodology of selecting the appropriate set of transmission modes (MODCOD subset) from a physical layer point of view for both DVB-S2 and extended DVB-RCS systems. Optimizing the achievable spectral efficiency with respect to implementation complexity has been the main focus of the proposed methodology. In particular, we show that subsets with 8 and 5 transmission modes provide best trade-off between the complexity of the ACM based system and the achieved average spectral efficiency for the forward and return link of the DVB-S2/RCS system respectively.