Performance study of 16-ary DEQAM modem for future satellite communication systems

Abstract

This paper investigates the effects of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), adjacent-channel interference (ACI) and co-channel interference (CCI) combined with flat fading on the performance of bandlimited 16-ary differentially encoded quadrature amplitude modulation (16-ary DEQAM) signalling transmitted through a non-linear high-power amplifier (HPA). The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) degradations at a specific bit error rate (BER) are evaluated for various values of channel roll-off factor α (channel bandwidth) and different degrees of output backoff (OBO) of the HPA in the presence of various combinations of the channel impairments. It is shown that by employing a baseband or RF predistortion technique for the HPA and selecting the best arrangement of channel roll-off factor, OBO value of the HPA and channel spacing, a good performance can be achieved regarding the most efficient use of bandwidth together with a minimum SNR degradation due to the presence of channel impairments. Thus, the use of 16-ary DEQAM for satellite communications is feasible in the near future.