Transmitter impairments in OFDM-based wireless LAN

The modulation scheme orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is well-known to be robust in highly dispersive fading environments. It was chosen as modulation scheme for the wireless local area networks (WLAN) HIPERLAN/2 (High Performance Radio Local Area Network type 2), IEEE 802.11a and HiSWAN (High Speed Wireless Access Network). Indoor and large open space environments are typical application scenarios for these WLAN. In this paper system aspects related to nonlinear distortions are investigated. Thereby, the focus is on the nonlinear distortions caused by the power amplifier, which have the major impact on the mutual relations of the system´s adjacent channel suppression, spectrum mask, and modulation accuracy. For the investigations the HIPERLAN/2 was chosen as an example