Total degradation analysis of precoded signals onto non-linear satellite channels

Linear precoding exploits the spatial degrees of freedom offered by multi-antenna transmitters to manage interferences between multiple co-channel users. The adoption of precoding in practical systems, however, entails a series of practical barriers. Amongst several issues, the focus herein is on the non-linear dependence of the input versus the output power of the efficient and reliable amplifiers that drive each transmit antenna, which limits the system performance. As a first step, the present work studies the impact of linear precoding on the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of precoded waveforms in multibeam satellite systems using a finite alphabet. In this context, a sensitivity analysis of the PAPR at the input of each amplifier with respect to intrinsic system level parameters, such as the number of transmit feeds, is performed. Next, the performance of the whole non-linear satellite chain is analyzed with respect to the symbol-error-rate (SER) and the total degradation (TD) of the channel. Furthermore, two low-complexity solutions are considered for counteracting the effects of the non-linearities of the satellite channel on the precoded waveforms, namely an automatic gain control (AGC) operation and a non-linear equalization performed at the receiver side.