On the sensitivity of SMT systems to oscillator phase noise over doubly-selective channels

In this paper, we analyze the effects of oscillator phase noise and doubly-selective fading channel on the performance of the staggered multitone (SMT) system. Unlike the more familiar discrete multitone (DMT) systems, SMT is shown to be insensitive to self-interference effects due to phase noise. The impeding channel and phase noise interference coefficients are defined and theoretical expressions for the inter-carrier and intersymbol interference are derived to establish solid analytical basis. We demonstrate the resilience of SMT waveform to phase noise distortion and channel fading effects in numerical experiments using appropriate models and the theoretical considerations are shown to fit well with simulation findings. Our assessment indicates that SMT system performs nearly as well as the classical DMT modulation for non-dispersive channels, while it outperforms DMT system by 2 dB for the studied fading channel scenario and fixed equalization complexity for both systems.