Satellite communications (SatComs) have recently entered a period of renewed interest motivated by technological advances and nurtured through private investment and ventures. The present survey aims at capturing the state of the art in SatComs, while highlighting the most promising open research topics. Firstly, the main innovation drivers are motivated, such as new constellation types, on-board processing capabilities, nonterrestrial networks and space-based data collection/processing. Secondly, the most promising applications are described i.e. 5G integration, space communications, Earth observation, aeronautical and maritime tracking and communication. Subsequently, an in-depth literature review is provided across five axes: i) system aspects, ii) air interface, iii) medium access, iv) networking, v) testbeds & prototyping. Finally, a number of future challenges and the respective open research topics are described.

Interference is traditionally viewed as a performance limiting factor in wireless communication systems, which is to be minimized or mitigated. Nevertheless, a recent line of work has shown that by manipulating the interfering signals such that they add up constructively at the receiver side, known interference can be made beneficial and further improve the system performance in a variety of wireless scenarios, achieved by symbol-level precoding (SLP). This paper aims to provide a tutorial on interference exploitation techniques from the perspective of precoding design in a multi-antenna wireless communication system, by beginning with the classification of constructive interference (CI) and destructive interference (DI). The definition for CI is presented and the corresponding mathematical characterization is formulated for popular modulation types, based on which optimization-based precoding techniques are discussed. In addition, the extension of CI precoding to other application scenarios as well as for hardware efficiency is also described. Proof-of-concept testbeds are demonstrated for the potential practical implementation of CI precoding, and finally a list of open problems and practical challenges are presented to inspire and motivate further research directions in this area.

Precoding has been conventionally considered as an effective means of mitigating the interference and efficiently exploiting the available in the multiantenna downlink channel, where multiple users are simultaneously served with independent information over the same channel resources. The early works in this area were focused on transmitting an individual information stream to each user by constructing weighted linear combinations of symbol blocks (codewords). However, more recent works have moved beyond this traditional view by: i) transmitting distinct data streams to groups of users and ii) applying precoding on a symbol-per-symbol basis. In this context, the current survey presents a unified view and classification of precoding techniques with respect to two main axes: i) the switching rate of the precoding weights, leading to the classes of block-and symbol-level precoding, ii) the number of users that each stream is addressed to, hence unicast-/multicast-/broadcast-precoding. Furthermore, the classified techniques are compared through representative numerical results to demonstrate their relative performance and uncover fundamental insights. Finally, a list of open theoretical problems and practical challenges are presented to inspire further research in this area. 1

This paper investigates the problem of the interference among multiple simultaneous transmissions in the downlink channel of a multi-antenna wireless system. A symbol-level precoding scheme is considered, in order to exploit the multiuser interference and transform it into useful power at the receiver side, through a joint utilization of the data information and the channel state information. In this context, this paper presents novel strategies which exploit the potential of symbollevel precoding to control the per-antenna instantaneous transmit power. In particular, the power peaks amongst the transmitting antennas and the instantaneous power imbalances across the different transmitted streams are minimized. These objectives are particularly relevant with respect to the non-linear amplitude and phase distortions induced by the per-antenna amplifiers, which are important sources of performance degradation in practical systems. More specifically, this work proposes two different symbol-level precoding approaches. A first approach performs a weighted per-antenna power minimization, under Qualityof-Service constraints and under a lower bound constraint on the per-antenna transmit power. A second strategy performs a minimization of the spatial peak-to-average power ratio, evaluated amongst the transmitting antennas. Numerical results are presented in a comparative fashion to show the effectiveness of the proposed techniques, which outperform the state of the art symbol-level precoding schemes in terms of spatial peak-toaverage power ratio, spatial dynamic range, and symbol-errorrate over non-linear channels.

Abstract-This paper investigates the problem of the interference among multiple simultaneous transmissions in the downlink channel of a multi-antenna wireless system. A symbol-level precoding scheme is considered, where the data information is used, along with the channel state information, in order to exploit the multi-user interference and transform it into useful power at the receiver side. In this framework, it is important to consider the power limitations individually for each transmitting antenna, since a common practice in multi-antenna systems is the use of separate per-antenna amplifiers. Thus, herein the problem of per-antenna power minimization in symbol-level precoding is formulated and solved, under Quality-of-Service constraints. In the proposed approach, the precoding design is optimized in order to control the instantaneous power transmitted by the antennas, and more specifically to limit the power peaks, while guaranteeing some specific target signal-to-noise ratios at the receivers. Numerical results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, which outperforms the existing state of the art techniques in terms of reduction of the power peaks and of the peak-to-average power ratio across the transmitting antennas.