Hardware Precoding Demonstration in Multi-Beam UHTS Communications under Realistic Payload Characteristics

in Proceedings of the 37th International Communications Satellite Systems Conference (2019, November 01)

In this paper, we present a new hardware test-bed to demonstrate closed-loop precoded communications for interference mitigation in multi-beam ultra high throughput satellite systems under realistic ... [more ▼]

In this paper, we present a new hardware test-bed to demonstrate closed-loop precoded communications for interference mitigation in multi-beam ultra high throughput satellite systems under realistic payload and channel impairments. We build the test-bed to demonstrate a real-time channel aided precoded transmission under realistic conditions such as the power constraints and satellite-payload non-linearities. We develop a scalable architecture of an SDR platform with the DVB-S2X piloting. The SDR platform consists of two parts: analog-to-digital (ADC) and digital-to-analog (DAC) converters preceded by radio frequency (RF) front-end and Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) backend. The former introduces realistic impairments in the transmission chain such as carrier frequency and phase misalignments, quantization noise of multichannel ADC and DAC and non-linearities of RF components. It allows evaluating the performance of the precoded transmission in a more realistic environment rather than using only numerical simulations. We benchmark the performance of the communication standard in realistic channel scenarios, evaluate received signal SNR, and measure the actual channel throughput using LDPC codes. [less ▲]

ARCHITECTURES AND SYNCHRONIZATION TECHNIQUES FOR COHERENT DISTRIBUTED REMOTE SENSING SYSTEMS

in 2019 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS) (2019, August 31)

Phase, frequency and time synchronization is a crucial requirement for many applications as such as multi-static remote sensing and distributed beamforming for communications. The literature on the field ... [more ▼]

Phase, frequency and time synchronization is a crucial requirement for many applications as such as multi-static remote sensing and distributed beamforming for communications. The literature on the field is very wide, and in some cases, the requirements of the proposed synchronization solution may surpass the ones set by the application itself. Moreover, the synchronization solution becomes even more challenging when the nodes are flying or hovering on aerial or space platforms. In this work, we compare and classify the synchronization technologies available in the literature according to a common proposed framework, and we discuss the considerations of an implementation for distributed remote sensing applications. The general framework considered is based on a distributed collection of autonomous nodes that try to synchronize their clocks with a common reference. Moreover, they can be classified in non-overlapping, adjacent and overlapping frequency band scenarios [less ▲]