Effects of Power Amplifier Distortion and Carrier Frequency Offset on the Performance of WLAN System

Due to the efficiency of mitigation multipath delay spread, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is extensively used in the wireless local area network (WLAN) domain, such as the IEEE 802.11a standard defined by the IEEE 802.11 standardization group and the HIPERLAN/2 defined by the European Telecommunication Standards Institute Project on Broadband Radio Access Networks. OFDM based WLAN system is very sensitive to the power amplifier distortion and the carrier frequency offset. The performance of the OFDM based WLAN system in the presence of the power amplifier distortion and the carrier frequency offset under practical fading channel is researched and analyzed in this paper. A closed form of bit error rate (BER) is derived for the OFDM based WLAN system in the presence of the power amplifier distortion and the carrier frequency offset under practical fading channel. The effects of the power amplifier distortion and the carrier frequency offset on the OFDM based WLAN system performance are comparatively studied by the theoretical method and by the simulation method under practical multipath fading channels. Studies show that the theoretical and simulated results match well.