Cooperative transmission over Rician fading channels for geostationary orbiting satellite collocation system

To enhance the spectral efficiency of geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) satellite communication systems with scarce GEO resources, cooperative transmission is widely used in GEO satellite collocation (GEOSC) systems. Current analysis on GEOSC channels is usually based on the hypothesis that channels are line‐of‐sight (LOS) ones, while multipath components are ignored. In this study, a more realistic cooperative transmission method is studied for GEOSC systems over Rician fading channels, where multipath components are taken into consideration in conjunction with LOS components. On the basis of this model, a practical user selection strategy with opportunistic beamforming is studied to optimise the capacity of GEOSC systems. Simulation results show that the GEOSC system using the techniques developed in this study has better performance comparing with the ones using existing approaches.