Turbo-coded APSK modulations design for satellite broadband communications

This paper investigates the design of power and spectrally efficient coded modulations based on amplitude phase shift keying (APSK) modulation with application to satellite broadband communications. APSK represents an attractive modulation format for digital transmission over nonlinear satellite channels due to its power and spectral efficiency combined with its inherent robustness against nonlinear distortion. For these reasons APSK has been very recently introduced in the new standard for satellite Digital Video Broadcasting named DVB-S2. Assuming an ideal rectangular transmission pulse, for which no nonlinear inter-symbol interference is present and perfect pre-compensation of the nonlinearity, we optimize the APSK constellation. In addition to the minimum distance criterion, we introduce a new optimization based on the mutual information; this new method generates an optimum constellation for each spectral efficiency. To achieve power efficiency jointly with low bit error rate (BER) floor we adopt a powerful binary serially concatenated turbo-code coupled with optimal APSK modulations through bit-interleaved coded modulation. We derive tight approximations on the maximum-likelihood decoding error probability, and results are compared with computer simulations. The proposed coded modulation scheme is shown to provide a considerable performance advantage compared to current standards for satellite multimedia and broadcasting systems. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.