Performance Analysis of Fractionally Spaced Equalization in Non-linear Multicarrier Satellite Channels

Joint amplification of multiple carriers with a single wideband high power amplifier (HPA) has been considered towards reusing the satellite resources among multiple links to reduce the mission cost. The non-linear characteristic of the HPA, especially near saturation, coupled with the on-board IMUX/ OMUX filters result in non-linear adjacent carrier interference (ACI) and inter-symbol interference (ISI) during multicarrier power amplification. To benefit from the advantages of multicarrier transmissions, on-ground techniques to mitigate the non-linear distortions need to be devised. These techniques include predistortion at the transmitter and equalization at the receiver. Several works have considered the use of multicarrier predistortion along with single carrier equalization. A symbol synchronous equalizer, while being simple to implement, may not necessarily provide for the optimum linear filter. Towards improving the performance, fractionally spaced equalizers (FSE) have been considered. Such receivers are shown to provide enhanced performance by effectively compensating for the group delay distortions. The objective of this work is to consider the use of FSE in the context of multicarrier transmissions over non-linear channels and illustrate their performance enhancements