Pulse Shaping for Satellite Systems with Time Packing: An Eigenfilter Design

Spectrum efficiency is becoming a major issue in satellite communications due to the dramatically increasing data rates requirements and the competition with terrestrial networks. The time packing strategy, by allowing to optimally exploit the available bandwidth without resorting to higher-order constellations, is a promising solution that has gained interest in the last years. The provided spectral efficiency improvement is obtained by accepting intersymbol interference (ISI) and the use of Nyquist pulse shaping filters is not required anymore for such systems. New filters, better complying with other design constraints can thus be considered. In this work, an eigenfilter design is proposed for the pulse shaping filters used in satellite systems with time packing. This design especially aim at limiting the envelope fluctuations of the transmit signals to offer better robustness against the distortions induced by highly nonlinear power amplifiers.