Constant-Envelope Precoding for Satellite Systems

In this paper, Constant-Envelope Precoding techniques are presented for satellite-based communication systems. In the developed transmission technique the signals of the antennas are designed to be of constant amplitude, improving the robustness of the latter to the nonlinear distortions on satellite systems, introduced by the employed on-board Traveling-Wave-Tube-Amplifiers. We consider the forward link of a multi-beam broadband satellite system where the aim is to design the signals at the gateway such that the desired symbols are transmitted to the intended user terminals and the transmitted signals from the satellite terminal are of constant amplitude. At first, the gateway signals are designed given that a fixed on-board beamformer is applied to the satellite terminal. Then, the case of an adaptive on-board beamformer is considered which is designed jointly with the gateway signals. The design of the gateway signals and the adaptive on-board beamformer, in the second case, requires solving difficult nonconvex problems. Efficient algorithmic solutions are developed based on the saddle point method. The effectiveness of the proposed approaches is verified via numerical results.