Neural Network SNR Prediction for Improved Spectral Efficiency in Land Mobile Satellite Networks

The use of satellites to cover remote areas is a promising approach for increasing communication availability and reliability. The satellite resources, however, can be quite costly, and developing ways to optimize their usage is of great interest. Optimizing spectral efficiency while keeping the transmission error rate above a certain threshold represents one of the crucial aspects of resource optimization. This paper provides a novel strategy for adaptive coding and modulation (ACM) employment in land mobile satellite networks. The proposed solution incorporates machine learning techniques to predict channel state information and subsequently increase the overall spectral efficiency of the network. The Digital Video Broadcasting Satellite Second Generation (DVB-S2X) satellite protocol is considered as the use case, and by using the developed channel simulator, this paper performs an evaluation of the proposed machine learning solutions for channels with various characteristics, with a total of 90 different observed channels. The results show that a convolutional neural network with a modified loss function consistently achieves an improvement (over 100% in some scenarios) of spectral efficiency compared to the state-of-the-art ACM implementation while keeping the transmission error rate under 0.01 for single channel evaluation. When observing two channels, an improvement of more than 300% compared to the outdated information spectral efficiency was obtained in multiple scenarios, showing the effectiveness of the proposed approach and allowing optimization of the handover strategy in satellite networks that allow user-centric handover executions.