Performance of Volterra and MLSD receivers for nonlinear band-limited satellite systems

This paper evaluates the performance of Volterra equalizers and maximum-likelihood sequence detection (MLSD) receivers for compensation of signal distortion in nonlinear band-limited satellite systems. In addition, the performance of a receiver with a fractionally-spaced equalizer followed by a Volterra equalizer is studied (FSE-Volterra equalizer). For the equalizers, adaptation of the equalizer weights is considered including a multiple-step LMS algorithm which improves the convergence characteristics. Two MLSD receiver structures are considered: the optimum receiver consisting of a matched-filter bank followed by a Viterbi (1967) detector and a suboptimum receiver consisting of a single receiver filter followed by a Viterbi detector. The performance of the MLSD receivers is then compared to that of the equalizers.