Adaptive Pre- and Post-compensation of Nonlinear Distortions for High-level Data Modulations

In this letter, we show how different signal processing techniques can be combined to optimize the performance of a typical wideband nonlinear satellite link with spectrally efficient high-level modulation techniques. In particular, we follow two concurrent approaches: on one side, we pursue signal optimization in the form of special amplitude and phase shift keying (APSK) constellations to reduce the effect of nonlinear distortions, while on the other, we analyze the feasibility of adaptive data predistortion (DP) at the transmitter and adaptive nonlinear equalization (NLE) at the receiver. We demonstrate that the use of such optimized constellations relieves the complexity of the nonlinearity compensation techniques, and we also show that by clever adoption of these techniques the sensitivity to nonlinear distortion of both uncoded and turbo coded quadrature amplitude modulation and APSK constellations is greatly reduced.