In this work, we present a centralized method for real-time rainfall estimation using Carrier-to-Noise power ratio (C/N) measurements from broadband satellite communication networks. The C/N data of both forward-link and returnlink are collected by the gateway station (GW) from the user terminals in the broadband satellite communication network and stored in a database. The C/N for such Ka-band scenarios is impaired mainly by the rainfall. Using signal processing and machine learning techniques, we develop an algorithm for realtime rainfall estimation. Extracting relevant features from C/N , we use artificial neural network in order to distinguish the rain events from dry events. We then determine the signal attenuation corresponding to the rain events and examine an empirical relationship between rainfall rate and signal attenuation. Experimental results are promising and prove the high potential of satellite communication links for real environment monitoring, particularly rainfall estimation.

In this work, we study the design of a precoder on the user downlink of a multibeam satellite channel. The variations in channel due to phase noise introduced by on-board oscillators and the long round trip delay result in outdated channel information at the transmitter. The phase uncertainty is modelled and a robust design framework is formulated based on availability and power constraints. The optimization problem is cast into the convex paradigm after approximations and the benefits of the resulting precoder are highlighted.

Abstract-A main challenge towards realizing the next generation Terabit/s broadband satellite communications (SatCom) is the limited spectrum available in the Ka band. An attractive solution is to move the feeder link to the higher Q/V band, where more spectrum is available. When utilizing the Q/V band, due to heavy rain attenuation, gateway diversity is considered a necessity to ensure the required feeder link availability. Although receive site diversity has been studied in the past for SatCom, there is much less maturity in terms of transmit diversity techniques. In this paper, a modified switch and stay combining scheme is proposed for a Q/V band feeder link, but its performance is also evaluated over an end-to-end satellite link. The proposed scheme is pragmatic and has close to optimal performance with notably lower complexity.