Iterative equalization in non-linear satellite channels

The nonlinear distortion in efficiently operated wide bandwidth and high power amplifiers often limits the throughput and performance of satellite communications. Volterra series decomposition provides an efficient and analytically tractable way to represent the nonlinear satellite communication channel. Realizing that only a few dominant terms in the Volterra series are needed to accurately describe the channel, this paper proposes a computationally efficient nonlinear soft interference cancellation (SIC) minimum mean square error (MMSE) equalizer. Simulation demonstrates that the nonlinear SIC MMSE equalizer outperforms its linear counter part in performance while achieving an 80% computational complexity reduction.