LTE-Downlink Performance in the Presence of RF-Impairments

In release 7,8,9 of the 3GPP specification the so called Long Term Evolution (LTE) will be defined for 3G radio access. The main targets for this concept are increased data rates, increased spectral efficiency and reduced latencies. This also represents a particular challenge for the Radio Frequency (RF) receiver design. The influence and the limitations of the RF-impairments are of particular interest. The implemented simulation chain in this paper is focused on the dependence of the DL-BER performance from RF-impairments I/Q-phase and amplitude imbalance, DC-offset, 3^rd order nonlinearities and effects of phase noise especially to find design targets for a LTE RF-receiver.