Effect of carrier phase jitter on single-carrier and multi-carrier QAM systems

In this contribution we investigate how the carrier phase jitter of a phase-locked oscillator for IF-to-baseband conversion affects the performance of single-carrier QAM (SC-QAM) and multi-carrier QAM (MC-QAM). This phase jitter reduces the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the input of the decision device, and therefore gives rise to an increase of the bit error rate. We show that, for a given jitter variance, SC-QAM and MC-QAM yield the same SNR degradation. However, when the synchronization for MC-QAM is derived from a pilot tone, we point out that the resulting jitter variance is considerably larger than for SC-QAM, in which case MC-QAM is degraded much more than SC-QAM