A Survey on Power-Amplifier-Centric Techniques for Spectrum- and Energy-Efficient Wireless Communications

In this paper, we provide a survey on techniques to improve the spectrum and energy efficiency of wireless communication systems. Recognizing the fact that power amplifier (PA) is one of the most critical components in wireless communication systems and consumes a significant fraction of the total energy, we take a bottom-up approach to focus on PA-centric designs. In the first part of the survey, we introduce the fundamental properties of the PA, such as linearity and efficiency. Next, we quantify the detrimental effects of the signal non-linearity and power inefficiency of the PA on the spectrum efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE) of wireless communications. In the last part, we survey known mitigation techniques from three perspectives: PA design, signal design and network design. We believe that this broad understanding will help motivate holistic design approaches to mitigate the non-ideal effects in real-life PA devices, and accelerate cross-domain research to further enhance the available techniques.