Power and bandwidth efficient modulation and coding for small satellite communication terminals |
The objective of this project is to maximise the power and bandwidth efficiency of small satellite Earth communication terminals whose main limitation to satellite capacity is a nonlinear transmitting power amplifier. A form of envelope equalisation is presented in which regular QPSK modulation is used together with instantaneous data magnitude modulation so as to produce a near constant envelope signal when filtered with root 35% raised cosine filtering. The algorithm for deriving the magnitude values is presented along with results using a data lookup table approximation. Bit error rate figures are presented for envelope equalisation combined with a (4096,3249) binary product code and MAP decoding. It is shown that at 10-6 BER the Eb/N0 is 3.52 dB, some 0.26 dB from the linear system. When used with a nonlinear power amplifier, the benefit of envelope equalisation is approximately 3 dB. The power spectrum is identical to that of the linear system with no spectral spreading and no increase in adjacent channel interference.
Tomlinson M, Ambroze MA, Wade G