Aperture Distribution Method for Array-Fed Reflectors: a System Level Performance Case Study

Array-Fed Reflectors provide the most favourable trade-off between performance, reconfigurability and cost for geostationary communication satellites. By combining the advantages of digital on-board processing, active antenna technology and reflector magnification, these systems can generate hundreds of beams simultaneously and achieve sum rates up to hundreds of Gbps. However, their design can be a time-consuming operation due to the full system simulation required at each iteration of the optimization loop. While the Physical Optics-based Current Distribution method provides the most accurate results, the Geometrical Optics-based Aperture Distribution one can significantly reduce the simulation time at the expense of accuracy. In this manuscript, we analyse the impact of this trade-off for a specific architecture. By computing the Aperture Distribution method on the GPU, the simulation time can be reduced by two orders of magnitude within a tolerable C/I error. This result encourages the use of such method in the early design phase.