A FREQUENCY OFFSET ESTIMATION AND COMPENSATION ALGORITHM FOR K/Ka-BAND COMMUNICATIONS

This paper presents a new open-loop technique for estimating and correcting Doppler frequency shift in K/Ka-band communication systems with special reference to the advanced communications technology satellite (ACTS) mobile terminal (AMT) modem, which utilizes square-wave pulse-shaped, binary differential phase shift-keyed (DPSK) modulation. The novelty of this estimation scheme is that it exploits the Doppler-induced phase shift over a fraction of a symbol interval to provide an estimate of the Doppler offset, without requiring symbol synchronization. Furthermore, by utilizing time-differential detection (delay-and-multiply), the proposed technique can tolerate much larger frequency offsets than existing open- or closed-loop techniques. Analytical results are provided for the variance of the above estimator and the error probability performance of the AMT is evaluated in the presence of the Doppler correction. Practical design considerations are also discussed, including a method for modifying the front end, digital bandlimiting filter in such a way that Doppler bias effects in the new estimator are eliminated. Simulation results reveal that, in general, performance improves with increasing data rates, i.e., the new frequency offset estimation/compensation algorithm induces a degradation from ideal of approximately 1 dB at a 6 dB energy per data symbol (bit) and a 2⋅4 kbps data rate. However, there is no appreciable degradation when the data rate is increased to 9⋅6 or 19⋅2 kbps.     

ACTS AERONAUTICAL EXPERIMENTS

This paper discusses a series of aeronautical experiments that utilize the advanced communication technology satellite (ACTS). As part of the ongoing effort to investigate commercial applications of ACTS technologies, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and various industry/government partners have developed a series of experiments that utilize the ACTS mobile terminal (AMT)¹ and the broadband aeronautical terminal¹ to investigate aeronautical uses of the ACTS. This paper discusses these experiments including the experiment configurations, technologies, results and future implications.     

PERFORMANCE OF COMBINED FREE/DEMAND ASSIGNMENT MULTIPLE-ACCESS SCHEMES IN SATELLITE COMMUNICATIONS

By combining free assignment with demand assignment, the combined free/demand assignment multiple-access (CFDAMA) protocol offers a much shorter delay at low and medium traffic loads while maintaining the high channel utility of the demand-assignment multiple-access (DAMA) technique. In these schemes, reservation can be made using pre-assigned (PA) or random-access (RA) request slots, or piggy-backing (PB) the request on a data packet. This paper presents a performance analysis of CFDAMA schemes in packet satellite communications. Illustrative examples are given. They show a good agreement between analytical and simulation results. For low and medium sizes of terminal population, the CFDAMA-PA scheme has an excellent delay-throughput performance. As the terminal population increases, its performance is gradually degraded due to the long waiting time for a request. For a very large number of terminals, the CFDAMA-RA becomes more effective than CFDAMA-PA. This indicates that a CFDAMA scheme using a hybrid PB/RA requesting protocol can provide the best performance for a wide range of terminal population sizes.