Dual Polarized Modulation and Reception for Next Generation Satellite Communications

This paper presents the novel application of polarized modulation (PMod) for increasing the throughput in mobile satellite transmissions. One of the major drawbacks in mobile satellite communications is the fact that the power budget is often restrictive, making it unaffordable to improve the spectral efficiency without an increment of transmitted power. By using dual polarized antennas in the transmitter and receiver, the PMod technique achieves an improvement in throughput of up to 100% with respect to existing deployments, with an increase of less than 1 dB at low E_b/N₀ regime. Additionally, the proposed scheme implies minimum hardware modifications with respect to the existing dual polarized systems and does not require additional channel state information at the transmitter; thus it can be used in current deployments. Demodulation (i.e., detection and decoding) alternatives, with different processing complexity and performance, are studied. The results are validated in a typical mobile interactive scenario, the newest version of TS 102 744 standard [Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN)], which aims to provide interactive mobile satellite communications.