W-band physical layer design issues in the context of the DAVID-DCE experiment

摘要

This paper aims at focusing on the aspects concerning the physical layer design for an innovative satellite communication experiment. Such an experiment, denoted by the acronym DAVID-DCE (Data and Video Interactive Distribution―Data Collection Experiment) is based on the exploitation of the W-band (75-110 GHz) for high-bit-rate satellite transmission. The potential advantages of using of the W-band are mainly related to the great bandwidth availability, and to the absence of interference. Moreover, an expected result of the experiment is a substantive improvement in the communication system's performances in the presence of meteorological phenomena (e.g. rain) as compared with the more conventional Ka-band satellite transmission. On the other hand, problems to be faced concern the non-ideal behaviours of hardware devices employed for high-frequency digital transmission. In particular, carrier recovery and timing recovery are the most crucial signal-processing tasks to be carefully considered in the design of the physical level of the system, because they considerably suffer from hardware impairments. The purpose of this work is to illustrate the proposed solutions in terms of the most critical modulation, demodulation and synchronization design issues, together with the effects of non-ideal behaviours of hardware components on BER performances.