Performance degradation of coded 8 PSK over a non-linear channel

One important difference between a satellite channel and an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel is the nonlinear characteristic of the power amplifiers used. Mobile systems are often power limited at the mobile Earth station, high bit rate TDMA are often power limited at the satellite, and in both cases the power efficient amplifiers used introduce nonlinear distortion. Theoretical analysis of such nonlinear systems is difficult, so the author presents the results of computer simulations which have been used to assess the degradation introduced by a nonlinear channel on the performance of coded 8 PSK