Co-design of direct radiating array architectures and radio resource management for future broadband satellite communication systems

Abstract

OVER the past years, with the transition from broadcast to broadband satellite communications, active direct radiating arrays have been seen as a key solution to guarantee high performance in terms of capacity, flexibility and reconfigurability. Such configuration gives a full flexibility in terms of coverage as beams can be steered along any desired direction within the field-of-view. However, the hardware complexity of such antenna configurations is unaffordable particularly in light of today’s on-board processors. The technological requirements lead to unrealistic architectures, especially for GEO coverages where thousands of radiating elements are needed. The proposed overlapping strategies with hybrid beamforming guarantee very strong performance by mitigating some unwanted interfering lobes which are particularly critical for satellite communications, while reducing the number of control points. While optimizing the antenna architecture is a key for reaching very high throughput, another challenge is the resource allocation. Frequency, time, beams, and power management must be achieved in order to avoid latency during the communication and fulfil the capacity demand. A full methodology is proposed in the thesis, considering a dual optimization of both the antenna architecture and a new resource allocation strategy in terms of throughput and time complexity.