Introduction
Satellite communication grows pretty fast especially after the last decade of the last
century. It started with Sputnik launching in 1957, followed by Score in 1958 to be
used in voice communication. The starting of the commercial use of satellites was
with Intelsat in the 1960s. most of the evolution of satellite communication through
the years were driven by its main characteristics which are its ability to cover any area
any time on earth, and being basically a radio system. Those characteristics led other
characteristics that controlled its applications and its deployment such as its ability to:
serve traffic over a wide area, provide broadcast, data collection, and point-to-point
services, and serve mobile users. The future development are related to main fields in
satellite communication: Mobile Satellite Communication, Fixed Services, Hybrid
systems, and Direct Broadcast systems[1].
Mobile is one of the fast-growing technologies especially after the 1990s. its
development is bounded by many factors :
Technical and commercial (methods of buying ,selling, and optimizing the
area capacity) innovations and development in other related technologies
Social needs
Economics, politics, and regional and global regulations
There are some technologies that will help in improving the performance and
efficiency in a way that will lead the mobile satellite system to grow like with the
techniques to improve the capacity, the system architecture, and enabling technologies
and system. Only some of those techniques will be discussed. And in the end the
market penetration will be provided too[1][3].
Capacity Enhancement
The beginning of the satellite communications was to operate in L and S bands and
later the C band. With increasing the demand for a better performance, higher data
rate, and faster services, those band can no longer fulfill those needs. That is why
broadband services are operating in Ku and Ka bands, and researches are directing to
Q and V bands too. To improve the spectral efficiency and to reduce the cost/bit,
some techniques related to some topics like Multi-User Detection, Static and Dynamic
frequency planning, and cross layer optimization are introduced under this goal.
Multi-user techniques was investigated for the terrestrial CDMA where many user can
operate in the same spectrum at the same time with a different code. In satellite
systems, all the codes in use should be known to the receiver, and that is not possible
in the mobile case. This is a topic of research since the computing power of the
mobile is limiting using it in the applications, and many researches have been
provided through the first decade of the century regarding the interference issues and
this one.
