W-band physical layer design issues in the context of the DAVID-DCE experiment

This paper aims at focusing on the aspects concerning the physical layer design for an innovative satellite communication experiment. Such an experiment, denoted by the acronym DAVID-DCE (Data and Video Interactive Distribution - Data Collection Experiment) is based on the exploitation of the W-band (75-110 GHz) for high-bit-rate satellite transmission. The potential advantages of using of the W-band are mainly related to the great bandwidth availability, and to the absence of interference. Moreover, an expected result of the experiment is a substantive improvement in the communication system's performances in the presence of meteorological phenomena (e.g. rain) as compared with the more conventional Ka-band satellite transmission. On the other hand, problems to be faced concern the non-ideal behaviours of hardware devices employed for high-frequency digital transmission. In particular, carrier recovery and timing recovery are the most crucial signal-processing tasks to be carefully co...