Enabling High-Order QAM OFDM for Satellite Feeder Links via PGIR-Integrated Companding
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Satellite feeder downlinks increasingly adopt orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing with high-order quadrature amplitude modulation, but the high peak-to-average power ratio drives the on-board high-power amplifier into its nonlinear region. This paper proposes adiscard-and-reconstructstrategy, codesigning a transmitter compander with receiver reconstruction at the resource-rich gateway, transparent and free of side information. AC1-smooth compander with saturation ratio η ∈ (0, 1] caps the peak-to-average power ratio. The receiver discards the large-amplitude samples and rebuilds them from the known null subcarriers by Papoulis–Gerchberg iterative reconstruction, without any model of the amplifier. Decomposing the finite-iteration reconstruction error, measured by the normalized meansquared error, into a signal-residual floor and a noise-propagation term yields an optimum that adapts to the signal-to-noise ratio across three regimes. The state-of-the-art hard-clipping compander is contained as the degenerate case η = 1, which the optimizer itself selects at low signal-to-noise ratio. Whether the propagated noise or the reconstruction residual dominates, the bit-error rate increases monotonically with the normalized mean-squared error independently of modulation order, so η follows from inexpensive profiling rather than from bit-error rates evaluated by Monte-Carlo simulation. TheC1tail givesO(1/f3) out-of-band decay, and simulations over the shadowed-Rician channel show a bit-error-rate gain over hard clipping that grows with modulation order and amplifier nonlinearity and is largest under the traveling-wave-tube amplifier. A per-symbol channel gate provably keeps the receiver at or below the hard-clip baseline in deep fades.
Author: Li Cho
Institution: Tatung University
Language: English
Topic: PAPR reduction in OFDM
Subfield: Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,645
OpenAlex ID: W7225822011
FWCI:
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: