A Decoupled Approach to Compensation for Nonlinearity and Intersymbol Interference

To achieve good efficiency in a space-based radio transmitter, its final amplifier must be operated near the saturation point, in its nonlinear region. Because of strict band limitations, this nonlinear operation is combined with the problem of intersymbol interference. Normally, these problems are addressed using a combination of equalization and power back-off, resulting in reduced power efficiency. Many proposed receiver-based methods, such as Volterra equalization, attempt to compensate for the nonlinearity and ISI in a single block before the detector, allowing higher efficiency operation, but introducing a great deal of complexity. We propose a receiver-based method in which the two effects are dealt with in separate blocks, an equalizer and a linearizer, resulting in considerable simplification. We go further and place the detector before the linearizer, achieving improved performance by eliminating the errors introduced by the linearizer. Simulation results compare favorably with the performance of a linear AWGN channel.