Overview and comparison of on‐ground and on‐board beamforming techniques in mobile satellite service applications
Jérôme Tronc, Piero Angeletti, Nuan Song, Martin Haardt, James W. Arendt, Gennaro Gallinaro · International Journal of Satellite Communications and Networking · 2013
SUMMARY The objective of this paper is to review state‐of‐the‐art techniques of beamforming in mobile satellite systems and evaluate the potential benefits/drawbacks of on‐ground beamforming compared with on‐board beamforming approach. The paper also provides a short analysis of beamforming error sources in on‐ground beamforming such as propagation effects at feeder link level, on‐board degradations at payload level, differential atmospheric perturbations, and Doppler shift effect. An investigation of signal processing techniques is also performed to provide a preliminary assessment of the interest for employing adaptive beamforming and precoding techniques in multi‐spots mobile satellite systems. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.