Design of MIMO Satellite System: Inter-antenna Spacing Determination and Possible Enhancement of Capacity

MIMO(Multiple Input Multiple Output) technology was found to exploit the channel richness and spatial diversity, its possible to increase data throughput and reduce the error probability[1]. MIMO channel capacity was derived by Teletar in [2], MIMO find its application in many technology such as HSPA and WLAN. Recent research were devoted to applicability of MIMO to satellite communication and for high altitude platforms (HAPs)[3]. Previous works were concentrated on describing the MIMO model [4] by mean of ray tracing. This paper is organized as follow: first, we investigate MIMO-SAT model for clear sky case and presents new method of computation of the covariance matrix in order to determine the inter-antenna spacing for the MIMO-SAT system at ground and in the satellite side by mean of capacity maximization. The second part will be devoted to MIMO-SAT model with atmospheric effect and impairment mitigation using precoding and dual polarization scheme.