Broadcasting of Multiple Data Streams in Overlapping Beams and Suitable Decoding Methods

We consider a broadcasting scenario in which multiple beams from one or more satellites serve partially overlapping coverage areas. The satellites transmit in the same frequency band and hence create strong interference between the transmitted data streams, in particular at the intersection of the beams. We evaluate various approaches for interference cancellation at the receiver with varying performance-complexity trade-off and with different synchronization requirements, including joint decoding of multiple streams, successive interference cancellation, joint detection with separate decoding and single-user decoding. We compute the channel capacities for a two-beam scenario, which provide the fundamental limits for the described decoding schemes.