Hybrid Selection/MRC for DVB-S2/RCS in land mobile satellite scenarios

In this paper, we propose a multi-antenna technique to improve the link reliability of a satellite communications system. More specifically, we consider a railway scenario where performance is considerably affected by periodic fading associated with power supply arches and tunnels. In order to optimize system performance in terms of SER and spectral efficiency, we adopt a reception strategy based on the Hybrid Selection/MRC approach. This technique consists in activating only the best sub-set of L antennas out of a total number of N antennas (L < N). By doing so, diversity gains offered by an N antenna system can be exploited but only L complete RF chains are required. Algorithm performance is compared with that obtained with several schemes exploiting spatial diversity in a different way. Finally, we derive a simplified version of the Hybrid Selection/MRC approach, where a lower number of antenna sub-sets are considered in the selection procedure. Computer simulation results show that most of the gains obtained with the full antenna system can be extracted with the proposed reduced complexity approach. © 2007 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. All rights reserved.