Magnitude Modulation Applied to LINC Transmitters: Paving the Road for Better Efficiency

The linear amplification with nonlinear components (LINC) amplification concept is very important on the developing of the modern mobile and satellite communications systems due to the use of inexpensive high power amplifiers (HPA). This paper analyses the effectiveness of combining an efficient PAPR reducing technique based on magnitude modulation (MM) when applied to a LINC amplification system. The simulation results show that the inclusion of the MM on the LINC processing chain is very favourable in terms of spectral regrowth introduced by signal´s clipping distortion. The system is also more robust to gain and phase imbalances between amplifiers with only a marginal bit error rate (BER) loss for an uncoded transmission scenario.