Grotz, J. et al. (2012) Multicarrier digital pre-distortion/ equalization techniques for non-linear satellite channels. In: 30th AIAA International Communications Satellite Systems Conference (ICSSC)http://dx.doi.org/10. 2514/6.2012-15156 N.B. When citing this work, cite the original published paper.

This paper analyzes the joint effects of in-phase and quadrature (I/Q) imbalance and power amplifier (PA) distortion for RF multiple input multiple output (MIMO) transmitters in the presence of crosstalk. This paper proposes candidate models for the digital predistortion of static I/Q imbalanced sources exciting a dynamic MIMO Volterra system. The proposed models are enhanced using a novel technique based on subsample resolution to account for dynamic I/Q imbalance distortions. Finally, the computational complexity of the proposed models is analyzed for implementation suitability in digital platforms. It is shown that the error spectrum for the proposed models in subsample resolution reaches the noise floor of the measurements. The proposed models achieve a normalized mean squared error of -50 dB and an adjacent channel power ratio of -57 dB for signal bandwidths upto 65 MHz and crosstalk levels ranging to -10 dB. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques in the joint mitigation of I/Q imbalance and PA distortion with crosstalk for a typical 2x2 MIMO telecommunication setup.

QC 20161122

Aiming to reduce the power/mass requirements in satellite transponders and to reduce mission costs, joint amplification of multiple carriers using a single high-power amplifier (HPA) is being considered. In this scenario, a careful investigation of the resulting power efficiency is essential as amplification is nonlinear, and multicarrier signals exhibit enlarged peak-to-average power ratio. Thus, operating the amplifier close to saturation vastly increases signal distortion resulting in a severe degradation of performance, especially for higher order modulations. This paper proposes a reduced-complexity digital predistortion (DPD) scheme at the transmitter and a corresponding equalizer (EQ) at the receiver to mitigate these nonlinear effects. Scenarios include both the forward as well as the return links. In particular, the paper exploits the MIMO Volterra representation and builds on a basis pursuit approach using a LASSO (least absolute shrinkage and selection operator) algorithm to achieve an efficient basis representation, avoiding large computational complexity, to describe the selection of predistorter/equalizer model. The work further compares and contrasts the two mitigation techniques taking various system aspects into consideration. The gains in performance and amplification efficiency demonstrated by the use of DPD/ EQ motivate their inclusion in next-generation satellite systems.

A digital predistortion (DPD) scheme is presented for non-linear distortion mitigation in multi-carrier satellite communication channels. The proposed DPD has a multiple-input multiple-output architecture similar to data DPD schemes. However, it enhances the mitigation performance of data DPDs using a multi-rate processing algorithm to achieve spectrum broadening of non-linear operators. Compared to single carrier (single-input single-output) signal (waveform) DPD schemes, the proposed DPD has lower digital processing rate reducing the required hardware cost of the predistorter. The proposed DPD outperforms, in total degradation, both data and signal DPD schemes. Further, it performs closest to a channel bound described by an ideally mitigated channel with limited maximum output power. IET Communications