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Growing interest in multimedia fixed applications calls for the development of point-to-point satellite systems capable of providing high-speed links at a competitive price. In order to meet this goal, next generation broadband satellite systems need to significantly increase their overall throughput. From a system point of view, this leads to the utilisation of high frequency bands (eg the Ka band) providing the adequate beam bandwidth, and to the deployment of a large number of beams allowing large reuse of frequency resources. Systems performances are as a consequence more and more affected by intra-system interference. From a physical layer perspective, highly efficient coding schemes are already used in the Reverse Link (RL) of current DVB-RCS [1] satellite systems and will be soon introduced in the Forward Link (FL) after having been standardized by the DVB-S2 [2] working group. Furthermore, fading mitigation techniques as adaptive coding and modulation are emerging with the aim of providing a higher flexibility and improve the overall system efficiency [3-4]. Exploitation of very efficient coded modulations operating at low signal-to-noise ratios renders more challenging the introduction of interference mitigation techniques in wireless systems. Multi User Detection (MUD) techniques appear in this context as a promising solution to further increase system capacity in an interference-limited and heavily loaded system. In the last decade an impressive amount of theoretical investigations have been carried out in the field of MUD algorithms. In particular, the effort has been focussed on CDMA systems, while considering TDMA systems to a …