Analytical performance evaluation of the OFDM systems in the presence of jointly fifth order nonlinearity and phase noise

This paper presents an exact theoretical analysis of the performance degradation in an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system when the signal including phase noise is passed through a nonlinear circuit such as high power amplifier (HPA). This circuit is modeled as a fifth order memory-less nonlinear polynomial model (5th order MLNPM). The nonlinear model is derived from important electrical parameters such as gain, 1-dB compression and 3rd order intercept point. Theoretical analysis shows that the detected data symbol at the receiver consists of attenuated version of the original transmitted data symbol, common phase error (CPE), inter-sub-carrier interference (ICI), third and fifth order intermodulation (IM) components. The analytical expressions for intermodulation noise term are derived using combinatorial methods. By use of the derived expressions, a closed-form output signal to noise ratio (SNR), degradation factor (DF) and probability of error can be evaluated theoretically. For verifying the accuracy of our analysis, comparisons between the theoretical and simulated results with electrical parameter of an actual and applicable HPA are presented. The comparisons show that bit error rate (BER) of analytical results is closely match with simulation results for OFDM system using M-QAM modulation.