Analysis of performance degradation due to non-linearity and phase noise in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing systems

This study presents an exact analysis of circuit non-linearity and phase noise effects on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) communication systems. Using an analytical approach, the degradation effects of these impairments on the performance of OFDM systems are studied. A truncated power series is used to represent the third-order non-linear behaviour of a radio frequency circuit. The phase noise is modelled with Lorentzian power density function. Then, by use of an expression for interferences and intermodulation terms, a closed-form signal-to-noise degradation relation is theoretically extracted. The analytical results are compared with simulation outcomes. The comparison shows that bit error rate of the analytical results closely matches with simulation results of the OFDM system.