Digital pre-distortion of radio frequency front-end impairments in the design of spectrally agile multicarrier transmission

In this paper, we analyze the impact of radio frequency (RF) front-end component impairments on spectrally agile multicarrier waveform transmission, and explain how these impairments can be compensated for on the digital side via preprocessing baseband modules. Although there has been a substantial amount of research conducted on digital signal processing techniques and RF front-end design, to the best of the authors´ knowledge, there has not been extensive research on PHY abstraction methodology that takes into consideration RF front-end impairment compensation for more realistic performance prediction of spectrally agile transceivers. Our goal is to show how it is both necessary and beneficial to model RF front-end impairment predistortion in PHY abstraction in order to predict instantaneous link performance for wireless communication systems in Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) networks. RF front-end impairments, such as nonlinearities caused by power amplifiers (PA), are investigated and digital predistortion (PD) approaches are proposed to compensate for these impairments. Simulation results show that baseband implementation of digital PD can effectively alleviate these distortions.