Evaluation of Array Fed Reflector Architectures for Broadband Satellite Missions

Baldominos, Alejandro; Mengali, Alberto; Fonseca, Nelson J. G.; Goussetis, George

doi:10.23919/isap47258.2021.9614383

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…This solution was introduced in [ 63 ] and proved useful for parametric studies using different beam-forming techniques and linear precoding in different multi-beam scenarios. A comparative study of different techniques to compute the elements excitation W was presented in [ 64 ].…”

Section: Applications Of the Toolmentioning

confidence: 99%

HERAS: A Modular Matlab Tool Using Physical Optics for the Analysis of Reflector Antennas

Baldominos

Mercader-Pellicer

Goussetis

et al. 2023

Sensors

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HERAS is a tool developed in Matlab for the analysis of reflector antennas using physical optics (PO) theory. Its graphical user interface (GUI) and source code are freely available for educational and research purposes. It has the necessity of being a flexible tool to provide adaptability to system engineering requirements and can also be of interest to antenna engineers working on the design of reflector antennas. Due to the increasing demand of broadband services, satellite communications systems are becoming highly complex in order to meet connectivity requirements. To fully exploit the benefits of these systems, multidimensional optimisations are crucial, which call for an efficient estimation of the coverage characteristics. Reflector-based solutions are one of the preferred architectures for very high-throughput satellite (VHTS) systems. A detailed description of HERAS is presented in this paper which has been validated with available commercial software packages. In addition, some examples are described in which the tool has been used for the efficient estimation of VHTS systems performance.

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Section: Applications Of the Toolmentioning

confidence: 99%

HERAS: A Modular Matlab Tool Using Physical Optics for the Analysis of Reflector Antennas

Baldominos

Mercader-Pellicer

Goussetis

et al. 2023

Sensors

Self Cite

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“…An in-house tool developed in Heriot-Watt University is used to characterize the AFR antenna [ 25 ]. This tool uses Physical Optics (PO) to obtain the far field of every feed in the required directions and implements acceleration methods to reduce the computational effort [ 25 , 26 ]. In this paper, the far field of every feed is computed for a fixed set of points.…”

Section: System Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… Sample the uniform set to obtain the approximated Poisson distribution of K points, as described in [ 29 ]. Compute the far field related to feed n and point

for all

and

, as described in [ 26 ]. Compute the free space loss using Equation ( 4 ) for all

.…”

Section: System Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Closed-Form Power Normalization Methods for a Satellite MIMO System

Segneri

Baldominos

Goussetis

et al. 2022

Sensors

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The paper proposes a new set of normalization techniques for precoding/beamforming matrices applicable to broadband multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) satellite systems. The proposed techniques adapt known normalization methods to account for the signal attenuation experienced by users due to the degradation of antenna gain and free space losses towards the edge of the coverage. We use, as an example, an array-fed reflector (AFR) antenna onboard a satellite in geosynchronous orbit (GEO), which provides a favorable trade-off between high-directivity, reconfigurability, and the requirement for digital processing, but suffers from high scan losses away from broadside due to optical aberrations when considered for global coverage applications. Three different precoding/beamforming techniques are employed, namely zero forcing (ZF), minimum mean squared error (MMSE), and matched filtering (MF). Low-complexity power normalization techniques digitally applied after the beamformer are introduced that, in the absence of any atmospheric effects, lead to iso-flux-like characteristics whilst satisfying the power constraint per feed. In comparison with other methods reported in the literature, mainly based on iterative algorithms, the proposed techniques consist in closed-form expressions to provide uniform signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and signal-to-noise plus interference ratio (SNIR) across the users without significant impact on the payload sum rate. Numerical results are presented to comparatively demonstrate the achieved performance in terms of total capacity and distribution of SNR and SNIR at various noise and interference scenarios.

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