Model Predictive Automatic Gain Control for Satellite Transponder under AWGN Jamming

This paper presents a model predictive automatic gain control (AGC) approach for satellite communications under partial-time partial-band additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) jamming. In particular, autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models are first fitted to data collected from different environments and then employed to compute gain control values. Different from the existing AGC schemes that design AGC based on the current tracking errors (i.e., the difference between the average amplitude and the desired amplitude), the proposed approach considers the future trends of the signals based on the ARIMA models, to quickly respond to the signal amplitude fluctuations. Extensive simulations of a satellite transponder link using Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (QPSK) modulated input signals and AWGN noise/jamming demonstrate that the proposed model predictive control AGC (MPC-AGC) approach can achieve better control performance of maintaining the desired signal amplitude range in the case of AWGN jamming, compared with the existing AGC schemes.