Non-Linear Distortion Cancellation and Symbol-Based Equalization in Satellite Forward Links

In this paper, a low-complexity symbol-based equalizer that performs non-linear distortion cancellation is proposed for application at the user terminal in the DVB-S2X satellite forward link. The channel is comprehensively modeled, including the non-linear travelling wave tube amplifier characteristics, the input-multiplexing and output-multiplexing filter responses at the satellite transponder, and the phase noise at the user terminal, according to the very-small aperture terminal reference scenario. Two detectors in the cancellation loop are considered, comparing the packet-error rate (PER) performance of simple maximum likelihood demodulation with hard decision to soft information exchange with low-density parity-check decoder, and showing only marginal improvement with the latter solution. The PER performance is compared against a number of pre-distortion techniques at the transmitter, such as dynamic data pre-distortion, successive data pre-distortion, and static data pre-distortion. The novel receiver demonstrates superior performance even with one iteration of distortion cancellation, while the joint application of successive data pre-distortion and iterative symbol-based equalization shows up to 4.95-dB energy efficiency gain for 32-level amplitude and phase-shift keying (32-APSK). The computational complexity is also evaluated. The improved receiver is particularly suitable for application with higher order modulation, a wide-band carrier, and low roll-off factors.