Equalization combined with trellis coded and turbo trellis coded modulation in the nonlinear satellite channel

We study advanced receiver based techniques to alleviate the effects of nonlinear distortion in the bandlimited coded nonlinear satellite channel. First we develop a novel reduced complexity maximum likelihood sequence estimator for a Volterra channel model, which can be used for combined equalization and decoding in trellis coded systems. We show that the combined equalization and decoding scheme gives about 1.0 dB gain for 16 QAM TCM (at a BER=10^-3) compared with conventional separate equalization, and is more robust with respect to deviation of the output back-off from its optimal value. We also investigate the performance of turbo coding in the nonlinear satellite channel using combined and separate equalization and decoding schemes