On the Passage of High-Level Pulsed Radio Frequency Interference Through a Nonlinear Satellite Transponder

Abstract

Under examination in this paper is the uncoded bit error rate (BER) performance of a satellite communications system in which the modulation scheme is binary PSK, the transponder contains an arbitrary amplitude nonlinearity, and high-level pulsed radio frequency interference (RFI) is present. The RFI may be characterized as either pulsed Gaussian noise or pulsed CW, with the burst duration shorter than that of the information bit and arrivals assumed to follow a Poisson law. Of special significance is the fact that a general approach is presented for direct BER evaluations; this is in contrast to other approaches which may, for example, employ signal-to-noise ratio suppression factors. Computed results are based on arbitrarily specified RFI scenarios and the presence of one of three amplitude nonlinearities-hard limiter, clipper, or blanker. In the context of these three specific nonlinearities, performance curves demonstrate the superiority of an appropriately chosen blanker when the RFI environment is particularly severe. Comparisons between hard limiting and clipping are also made. Additional results examine performance sensitivity to information bit rate, variations in signal power, and the ratio of CW to noise content. With respect to the latter, CW effects are found to be most severe.