High Speed Modem Concepts and Demonstrator for Adaptive Coding and Modulation with High Order in Satellite Applications

Within the satellite communications innovation trend, some key issues, such as: • usage of increasingly high frequency bands (e.g., from X, Ku, up to Ka and Q;). • the higher frequency reuse achievable with multi-beam satellite antenna technology; • the increasing satellite RF power becoming available thanks to the platform technology improvement; • the exploitation of Adaptive Coding and Modulation (ACM) techniques in addition to power control to reduce the static link margin and matching the physical layer to the location and time dependent SNIR [1], [2] are shifting the focus from classical satellite modulation schemes, such as QPSK, to higher order M-ary modulation schemes. The latter can provide a higher spectral efficiency and thus the data rate required for either multi-media applications or for applications such as point-to-point high data rate backbone connectivity, and future Earth Observation missions requiring downlink data rates exceeding 1 Gb/s.