Robust THP Design for Energy Efficiency of Multibeam Satellite Systems with Imperfect CSI

In this letter, we investigate a robust zero-forcing (ZF) Tomlinson-Harashima Precoding (THP) scheme for multibeam satellite downlink systems to improve the energy efficiency (EE) when the channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter is imperfect. By using a norm-bounded error (NBE) model with unknown statistical characterization, the worst case EE optimization problem under transmit power constraint is solved with two steps. Firstly, the optimal CSI uncertainty parameter minimizing the EE is obtained, then sequential convex approximation (SCA) is used to obtain the solution via a nested iteration method. The proposed robust algorithm achieves better EE performance in comparison with the nonrobust one in the literature in the presence of CSI error, which can be shown from simulation results.