Assessing and modelling the effect of RF impairments on UTRA LTE uplink performance

In this paper we investigate the effect of modelled RF transmitter impairments on UTRA Long Term Evolution (LTE) uplink link performance. Nonlinear power amplifier, gain imbalance, phase imbalance, and phase noise are considered. The main contributions of this work is assessment of the relation between Error Vector Magnitude (EVM) and link performance loss due to each impairment and the investigation of a white Gaussian noise source in the transmitter as an equivalent model of the impairment. The results obtained are based on the UTRA LTE uplink parameter settings. Results show that the EVM is a good measure to estimate the link level performance loss for numerous impairments. The performance degradation in AWGN and a frequency selective fading when using a white noise source as an equivalent transmitter RF impairment model, fits well with the other impairments in the anticipated range of EVM. An analytical formulation describing the effect of the white noise source in the SNR loss fits similarly with the simulation results. With 16QAM rate 3/4, an EVM value of 8% corresponds to an SNR loss of approximately 0.5 dB.