Spectral broadening effects of high-power amplifiers in MIMO–OFDM relaying channels

The combination of MIMO–OFDM is a very attractive solution for broadband wireless services. Thus, the two prominent fourth-generation (4G) cellular systems, WiMAX and LTE-advanced, have both adopted MIMO–OFDM transmission at the physical layer. OFDM signal however suffers from nonlinear distortions when passed through high-power amplifier (HPA) at the RF stage. This nonlinear distortion introduces out-of-band spectral broadening and in-band distortions on the transmitted signals. 4G cellular standards have placed strict limits on the allowable spectral broadening in their spectrum mask specifications, to insure that data transmission on a given channel is not interfering significantly with an adjacent channel user. In this article, we characterize the out-of-band spectral broadening introduced by HPA when MIMO–OFDM signals are transmitted over multiple relaying channels. Expressions for the power spectral density of MIMO–OFDM signals are derived over multiple relay channels, and the cumulative effects of HPA on the spectrum of the transmitted signals are estimated. It is shown that depending on the number of relays and the relaying configuration employed, it may happen that a transmitted MIMO–OFDM signal with the transmit spectrum mask initially within the allowable set limit at the source node arrives at the destination violating this limit due to the cumulative effects of the multiple HPA’s in a multihop relaying channel.