On the use of OFDM radio interface for satellite digital multimedia broadcasting systems

The paper considers the application of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) techniques in the physical layer of a satellite system devoted to the provision of digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) services, which are presently the focus of extensive research and development endeavours. In particular, the paper demonstrates that the inherently high spectrum efficiency of OFDM can be retained even in unfavourable propagation channels affected by heavy non-linear distortion introduced by the on-board high power amplifier. This encouraging performance is achieved through the proper design and application of coding and pre-distortion techniques, as described in the paper. Based on these results, the paper considers also the comparison of OFDM and High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) techniques. HSDPA is the standardized radio interface for 3G terrestrial mobile networks. Copyright (c) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.