This paper examines the integration of vector coded caching (VCC) into multi-beam satellite communications (SATCOM) systems and demonstrates that even limited receiver-side caching can substantially enhance spectral efficiency. By leveraging cached content to suppress interference, VCC enables the concurrent transmission of multiple precoded signal vectors that would otherwise require separate transmission resources. This leads to a multiplicative improvement in resource utilization in SATCOM. To characterize this performance, we model the satellite-to-ground channel using Rician-shadowed fading and after incorporating practical considerations such as matched-filter precoding, channel state information (CSI) acquisition overhead as well as CSI imperfections at the transmitter, we here derive closed-form expressions for the average sum rate and spectral efficiency gain of VCC in SATCOM. Our analysis, tightly validated through numerical simulations, reveals that VCC can yield spectral efficiency gains of 300% to 550% over traditional multi-user MISO SATCOM with the same resources. These gains -- which have nothing to do with multicasting, prefetching gains nor file popularity -- highlight VCC as a pure physical-layer solution for future high-throughput SATCOM systems, significantly narrowing the performance gap between satellite and wired networks.

翻译：本文研究了矢量编码缓存（VCC）技术在多波束卫星通信（SATCOM）系统中的集成应用，并证明即使接收端缓存容量有限，也能显著提升频谱效率。通过利用缓存内容抑制干扰，VCC使得多个预编码信号向量能够同时传输，而这些信号在传统方案中需要占用独立的传输资源。这为卫星通信的资源利用率带来了倍增式改进。为量化该性能，我们采用莱斯阴影衰落模型建立星地信道模型，在综合考虑匹配滤波预编码、信道状态信息（CSI）获取开销以及发射端CSI不完善等实际因素后，推导出VCC在SATCOM中的平均和速率与频谱效率增益的闭式表达式。经数值仿真严格验证的分析表明：在相同资源条件下，VCC相较于传统多用户MISO SATCOM系统可实现300%至550%的频谱效率增益。这些与组播、预取增益及文件流行度无关的增益，凸显了VCC作为未来高通量卫星通信系统纯物理层解决方案的潜力，显著缩小了卫星网络与有线网络之间的性能差距。