Achieving a terabit/s geo satellite system

Present high-capacity GEO satellites provide throughput in the range of 70 Gb/s (Ka-Sat) up to 140 Gb/s (ViaSat-1, EchoStar 17). In order to keep up with the quickly increasing bit rate requirements of new services and applications, future satellites must increase their capacity by an order of magnitude, thus reaching the Terabit/s throughput class. In order to achieve a Terabit/s satellite system, a multitude of issues, limitations and problems must be taken into account. The paper addresses several of these important issues, such as user link bandwidth requirement, feeder link capacity requirement, and satellite power requirements. Moreover, optical feeder links are considered