Design of Rate Constrained Multi-User Receivers for Satellite Communications

In the realm of satellite communications, one of the great impairments to increase the spectral efficiency is multi-user interference in the reverse link (mobile to satellite). Standards techniques based on reuse factors and beam design, although interesting from an interference cancellation point of view, penalize dramatically the rate. In this contribution, we show how proper power allocation for successive interference cancellation can enhance the performance of satellite communications in the context of DVB-RCS systems with a high number of users. For a given user target rate, we provide a suitable algorithm based on minimum mean square error successive interference cancellation and assess the performance through various simulations.