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The Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE) sets forth ambitious requirements for broadband communications, in which Satellite Communications (SatCom) play a major role. In this context, spectrum sharing techniques offer unprecedented opportunities to increase capacity and reduce costs in order to allow SatCom to meet the DAE objectives. The EU FP7 Project CoRaSat is assessing Cognitive Radio (CR) techniques for Ka-band SatCom scenarios, showing that coexistence between Fixed Satellite Service (FSS) and Broadcasting Satellite System (BSS)/Fixed Service (FS) links would introduce significant benefits in non-exclusive frequency bands. In this paper, spectrum awareness and exploitation techniques are analyzed. Simulation results show that significant improvements can be obtained in both spectrum utilization (up to 2.4 GHz of additional spectrum) and available throughput (up to 600% increase).