Performance of regenerative/conventional satellite systems

An evaluation is made of the most significant results on the advantages of regenerative communications satellite systems that can be gathered from the literature published to date, with attention to linear and nonlinear satellite performance characteristics with and without interference. The superior performance displayed by a regenerative system in the presence of interference is significant consideration in those situations where nearly 40 percent of the total system noise comes from sources other than satellite transponder and ground station receiver noise. Onboard processing provides facilities which are not available from a nonregenerative satellite system; different multiple access modes could be selected according to the specific constraints of the up- and down-links.