Design and Evaluation of Fade Mitigation Techniques Using a VHTS Testbed Simulator

Satellite communication services increasingly require more bandwidth to support the growth of capacity‐hungry applications. In response, operators are deploying or exploring higher frequency bands to meet this demand. However, these frequencies are more susceptible to signal fading, particularly during heavy rain events, which can cause significant outages in the feeder link. To address these critical issues, fade mitigation techniques (FMTs) should be implemented. However, they require extensive parameter tuning and optimization during system development. Therefore, extensive simulation and calibration are necessary before system deployment. To assess this issue, we propose a test‐bed simulator (TBS), capable of testing a broad range of FMTs. Our VHTS simulator implements a wide variety of these mitigation techniques—uplink power control (ULPC), adaptive coding and modulation (ACM), and smart gateway diversity (SGD)—in a fully reconfigurable manner, allowing flexible adjustment of design parameters. Results of the FMT under several parametric simulations, using large datasets of synthetic and measured attenuation time series are discussed.