Hardware precoding demonstration in multibeam UHTS communications under realistic payload characteristics

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new hardware test-bed to demonstrate closed-loop precoded communications for interference mitigation in multi-beam ultra high throughput satellite systems under realistic payload and channel impairments. We build the test-bed to demonstrate a real-time channel aided precoded transmission under realistic conditions such as the power constraints and satellitepayload non-linearities. We develop a scalable architecture of an SDR platform with the DVB-S2X piloting. The SDR platform consists of two parts: analog-to-digital (ADC) and digital-to-analog (DAC) converters preceded by radio frequency (RF) front end and Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) backend. The former introduces realistic impairments in the transmission chain such as carrier frequency and phase misalignments, quantization noise of multichannel ADC and DAC and non-linearities of RF components. It allows evaluating the performance of the precoded transmission in a more realistic environment rather than using only numerical simulations. We benchmark the performance of the communication standard in realistic channel scenarios, evaluate received signal SNR, and measure the actual channel throughput using LDPC codes.