  Whenever multibeam satellite systems target very aggressive frequency reuse
in their coverage area, inter-beam interference becomes the major obstacle for
increasing the overall system throughput. As a matter of fact, users located at
the beam edges suffer from a very large interference for even a moderately
aggressive planning of reuse-2. Although solutions for inter-beam interference
management have been investigated at the satellite terminal, it turns out that
the performance improvement does not justify the increased terminal complexity
and cost. In this article, we pay attention to interference mitigation
techniques that take place at the transmitter (i.e. the gateway). Based on this
understanding, we provide our vision on advanced precoding techniques and user
clustering methods for multibeam broadband fixed satellite communications. We
also discuss practical challenges to deploy precoding schemes and the support
introduced in the recently published DVB-S2X standard. Future challenges for
novel configurations employing precoding are also provided.
