Filter bank-based multiple access in next-generation satellite uplinks: A DVB-RCS2-based experimental study

In the context of the on-going evolution of satellite communications (SatCom) systems to their next generation, and in the direction of their integration with fifth generation (5G) terrestrial networks, it is of interest to study in depth the applicability in realistic SatCom of waveforms that have shown promise to meet the 5G requirements. This paper presents a comparative study, based on total degradation (TD) over a range of output back-off (OBO) values, on out-of-band emission and spectral efficiency, of frequency division multiple access (FDMA) schemes employing offset quadrature amplitude modulation-based filter bank multi-carrier (FBMC /OQAM), classical orthogonal FDMA (OFDMA), and their single-carrier counterparts to illustrate the potential gains from the integration of the FBMC waveforms in the satellite context and standards. The air interface simulated follows the digital video broadcasting (DVB) family of standards for the satellite uplink, considering both time and frequency synchronization impairments and two typical input constellations. Our results confirm the superiority of the single-carrier (SC) schemes in such a nonlinear environment. The SC-FBMC waveform is shown to be the most practical candidate since it is shown to attain a TD performance similar to that of SC-OFDM at absolutely no cost in spectral efficiency.