Analysis and Compensation of Bandpass Nonlinearities for Communications

There are many instances in communication systems where bandpass signals are passed through nonlinear devices, such as traveling wave tubes, which exhibit both amplitude and phase nonlinearities. When the input signal is narrow band, the device may be characterized by measurements of its single-carrier amplitude and phase transfer functions. A sufficient model for such a device is a quadrature structure that includes two nonlinearities each of which, acting on its own, would exhibit only amplitude distortion. The outputs of the two halves of this model are linearly independent for arbitrary narrow-band input signals so that their power spectra add. Consequently, almost all previously published results for amplitude nonlinearities can be readily applied to the analysis of the general device. Emphasis is laid on practical procedures for analysis based directly on measured device characteristics rather than analytic approximations and accuracy is checked by comparison of certain intermodulation results with previous results and with measurements. A new result is the performance of an Intelsat IV tube for a large number of independent equal-power-density signals. A heuristically optimal saturating nonlinearity is introduced and analyzed and two methods of compensating an arbitrary saturating device to obtain this optimal characteristic are presented. Two methods of inverting the Chebyshev transform are used in this paper and the choice of basis functions for obtaining series representations of the measured device characteristics is discussed.