5G New Radio in Nonlinear Satellite Downlink: A Physical Layer Comparison with DVB-S2X

This paper assesses the 5G New Radio (NR) physical layer for satellite downlink transmission requiring power amplification (PA) with low backoff, thereby suffering significant nonlinear distortion. State-of-the-art single-carrier (SC) transmission used in satellite digital video broadcasting (DVB-S2X) is used as a baseline. Subject to nonlinear PA, out-of-band emissions, modulation quality, and degradation in block error rate performance are compared between data transmission with the DVB-S2X waveform and the 5G NR ones, namely, CP-OFDM (cyclic prefix orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing) and its transform-precoded SC variant called DFT-s-OFDM (discrete Fourier transform-spread OFDM).