Performance analysis of combined equalization and decoding in the trellis coded nonlinear satellite channel

Advanced receiver based techniques to alleviate the effects of nonlinear distortion in the bandlimited coded nonlinear satellite channel are considered. We propose a reduced complexity combined maximum likelihood equalization and decoding method using a nonlinear Volterra channel model in the trellis coded system. Our scheme includes conventional nonlinear compensation based on centroid estimation and decoding metric modification as a special case. Both analysis and simulation results show significant performance gain compared with separate Volterra equalization and decoding and also centroid estimation based decoding. Several methods of performance analysis in the nonlinear channel are discussed and compared.