Performance analysis of MCDD in an OBP satellite communications system

Multi-carrier demultiplexer/demodulator (MCDD) in an on-board processing (OBP) satellite used for digital multimedia services has two typical architectures according to the channel demultiplexing procedure: Multistage multi-carrier demultiplexer (M-MCD) or poly-phase fast Fourier transform (PPF). During the channel demultiplexing, phase and quantization errors influence the performance of MCDD; those errors affect the bit error rate (BER) performance of M-MCD and PPF differently. In this paper, we derive the phase error variances that satisfy the condition that M-MCD and PPF have the same signal to noise ratio according to quantization bits, and then, with these results, analyze the BER performances of M-MCD and PPF. The results provided here may be a useful reference for the selection of M-MCD or PPF in designing the MCDD in an OBP satellite communications system.