Quantized Digital Amplification with combination over the air - Achieving maximum efficiency on communication links between long range UAVs and satellites

Abstract

Uplink high throughput is essential to assure good situational awareness in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) mission. For that purpose larger bandwidths should be combined with the maximum possible spectral efficiency at the uplink. This leads to the use of multilevel broadband modulations with high Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) values that may compromise the power amplification efficiency of current amplification technologies. High efficiency can be assured in these links with a new amplification scheme based on the Quantized Digital Amplification (QDA) technique that combines broadband support with both low complexity and high energy efficiency of signal power amplification stage. Spectral efficiency is also assured due to the QDA capacity to deal efficiently with multilevel modulations with high PAPRs, commonly used to assure high spectral efficiencies. The several cases analyzed here show the effectiveness and the robustness of the new technique to support efficiently the signal amplification in these links.