Hardware Impairments on LDPC Coded SC-FDE and OFDM in Multi-Gbps WPAN (IEEE 802.15.3c)

The multi-Gbps wireless personal area network (WPAN) using 60-GHz is being standardized in the task group of IEEE 802.15.3c. In the physical (PHY) layer design, there are two competitive techniques, one is orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and the other is single-carrier frequency-domain equalization (SC-FDE), a.k.a., single-carrier block transmission (SCBT). This paper compared the performance of low-density parity-check (LDPC) coded OFDM and SC-FDE under hardware impairments including analog-to-digital converter (ADC) resolution, non-linear distortion induced by 60- GHz power amplifier (PA), and phase noise of 60-GHz PLL circuits. The simulation results show that SC-FDE has much better performance than OFDM under hardware impairments of 60-GHz devices and circuits.