A high performance waveform for military Ka-band satellite communications

The physical and link layer design of an advanced waveform suited for Military Satcom operation is presented. The waveform is designed to support a large range of terminal dish sizes and provides Ka band rain fade mitigation. The waveform is extremely flexible supporting data rates from 64 kbps up to 155 Mbps and spectral efficiencies from 0.5 bits per symbol up to 3.8 bits per symbol. 16-ary amplitude phase shift keying (16-APSK) modulation is used in conjunction with adaptive pre-distortion to provide spectral efficiencies in excess of 3 bits per symbol while minimizing the terminal HPA (or SSPA) backoff requirements needed to support the 16-ary modulation. The FEC consist of a new "turbo like code" (TLC) with selectable code rates from 1/2 to 19/20 and information block sizes from 1024 to 16,384 bits per block. The framing and header design within the waveform provides flexible multiplexing of overhead channels with the primary data stream as well as automatic information throughput adaptation (ITA). The later allows for Satcom terminals to dynamically adjust their modulation and coding rates during the changing link conditions encountered during Ka-band rain fade events.