Effects of channel phase in multibeam multicast satellite precoding systems

Abstract

This paper revisits the impact of channel phase in multibeam multicast satellite precoding. First, we analyze the unicast case showing that the phase components relative to the different slant paths to each user do not affect the precoding performance. Then, we indicate that for the multicast transmission, the mentioned phase effect may have impact depending on the employed clustering technique. Finally, we propose an alternative clustering solution based on normalizing out the phase components relative to the different slant paths. According to our simulation results, this novel clustering technique provides robustness to these phase components and also behaves better than previously reported clustering schemes.