Wiener predistorter for nonlinear satellite downlinks

The nonlinear power amplifier and the analogue output channel filter with nonconstant group delay add nonlinear and linear distortions to the satellite transmitted signal, respectively. Recently, there has been growing interest in using Wiener predistorters, consisting of separate nonlinear and linear components, to compensate for these distortions in the satellite downlinks. The Wiener predistorter has been shown to effectively deal with signal distortions and has lower complexity compared to other state-of-the-art methods. In this paper, we argue that fully compensating the nonconstant group-delay distortion degrades the overall performance of the Wiener predistortion systems. This is primarily due to the increased peak-to-average power ratio of the signal at the output of the linear predistorter. We show that the overall performance of the Wiener predistorter can be improved by undercompensating the group-delay distortion. We propose two optimizations to address the PAPR growth problem and show using simulations that our approach leads to significant improvement in predistortion performance. Using our Wiener predistorter, the total degradation gap to the ideal limiter channel can be reduced to merely 0.34 dB for 64-APSK modulated signals.