Analysis and Performance of MIMO-OFDM in Mobile Satellite Broadcasting Systems

The mobile satellite broadcasting arena is witnessing a constant increase in demand for improved transmission quality and higher number of services in order to remain on par with the corresponding terrestrial counterparts. A promising way forward in this regard is the migration from the conventional single polarization per beam to an advanced dual polarization per beam architecture for effective spectrum exploitation; this also enables the application of advanced multiple antenna (MIMO) techniques. The present paper moves from DVB-SH the current state-of-the-art for mobile satellite services towards a more advanced system architecture doubling the overall system capacity with a minimum power increase. It turns out that a multiplexing gain equal to two comes at a cost of about 6 dB for the conventional single polarization system, whereas for the advanced system the corresponding cost is about 3.5 dB.