Effect of Satellite System Impairments on a Multilevel Coding System for Satellite Broadcasting

In this paper, we evaluate a multilevel coding (MLC) scheme with multistage decoding (MSD) designed for satellite broadcasting communications. The impact of three different satellite system impairments on the decoding performance is analyzed. First, the influence of errors introduced by the channel estimation is discussed, assuming a typical data-aided (DA) channel estimator with different pilot lengths. Second, the impact of the residual phase noise present after the phase recovery is investigated using a model based on a normal distribution. Finally, the degradation introduced by the non-linearities of the satellite power amplifiers is also analyzed. The impact of these effects is investigated via the mutual information. Besides, bit error rate (BER) simulations are performed for each impairment effect. The considered MLC scheme is compared to a classical bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) scheme, showing that the MLC scheme provides different grades of robustness for each level.