This paper investigates how to boost the forward link capacity in multibeam satellite systems. Since co-channel interference is the main inhibitor to achieve the full potential of frequency reuse, we propose to mitigate the negative impact of interference through cooperative transmission schemes. When desired information is shared among two beams, rates can be assigned to each user independently. This is crucial to benefit from the use of adaptive coding and modulation. In addition, the receiver can resort to multi-user detection, which is proven to give satisfactory performance when several signals are simultaneously received. Numerical results reveal that the proposed cooperative strategy brings substantial improvements, in terms of spectral efficiency, with respect to multibeam satellite systems, where receivers treat the interference as noise and data content is plainly delivered through the corresponding beam.

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