• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.46 no.10
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• pp.856-867
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• 2018

This paper presents the applicability of MIMO joint decoding to dual-contact satellite systems in which two LEO satellites using X-band frequency band are transmitting each image data to two ground station antennas, simultaneously. When two satellites are closely positioned within the looking angle of the two antennas, each satellite interferes with each other by the relative antenna gain corresponding to an offset angle and this might cause the performance degradation without interference mitigation. To mitigate the performance degradation, SM MIMO techniques for joint decoding are applied. Especially, the relative antenna gain of ground station depending on the angle difference between two satellites in ground station antenna plays an important role in modelling the dual-contact satellite systems. The condition number of MIMO channel including the antenna gain calculated from the mathematical gain pattern model was primarily analyzed. Simulation results showed that the SM MIMO techniques using detection schemes such as ZF-SIC, MMSE-SIC, and ML can be applicable to dual-contact satellite systems.