RF testing of OFDM and CI/OFDM signal over satellite channel

OFDM and OFDM-based spread spectrum systems have found widespread acceptance in today's wireless communication standards. There is also a growing interest in the application of OFDM based technologies to satellite links, as a means to exploit frequency diversity and improve frequency efficiency. In this work, the authors employ RF test equipment and analyze the practical performance of an OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) based satellite links and the performance of a proposed carrier interferometry (CI) OFDM based satellite links. Specifically, over a C-band satellite channel, RF test results are generated for BPSK, QPSK, 16 QAM and 64 QAM modulation schemes and both technologies. It is shown that OFDM based technologies achieve higher frequency efficiency relative to traditional methods. Furthermore, it is shown that in a number of key test cases, the proposed CI-OFDM technology outperforms traditional OFDM.