Performance Analysis of SC-FDMA in the Presence of Receiver Phase Noise

In this paper we study the effect of receiver phase noise on single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA). We show that common phase error rotates all the symbols by a certain angle and that the higher order frequency components of phase noise result in inter-carrier interference, or ICI and draw parallels to orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA). We then study the effect of phase noise on the performance of linear receivers that are often used in practice. In particular, we show that the amount of ICI affecting the sub-carriers depends closely on the allocation of sub-carriers among different users and prove that the performance of linear receivers in the presence of receiver phase noise deteriorates much more in the case of interleaved SC-FDMA than in the case of localized SC-FDMA. We identify the association of the significant phase noise components with the components of multi-user interference to be the fundamental reason behind the performance gap between interleaved and localized SC-FDMA.