The sensitivity of modulation fidelity on PA envelope variation in OFDM transmitter systems

Intermodulation distortion (IMD) caused by nonlinear power amplifier (PA) is a major weakness in orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) transmitter systems, and most behavioral studies of IMD are based on specific example PAs. In recent papers, PA percentage linearization (PL), a general measurement for PA envelope variation, is investigated for its influence on system performance. Meanwhile, PL still somehow depends on specific example PA, and it mostly considers the PA saturation point (SP) variation. In this paper, a comparison analysis is presented to investigate the system performance when both SP and nonlinearity onset point (NOP) variations are considered. The simulations show that how the PA envelope variation can be represented by the signal impairment over IBO and OBO domains, respectively. It is interesting to find that although SP attracts much concern in current studies, NOP actually has a clear influence on modulation fidelity of nonlinear OFDM transmitter systems. Moreover, it is observed that when input power gets close to saturation range, the PAs having relatively higher nonlinearity show relatively lower distortion level over the input power domain. These interesting simulation observations above are analytically explained based on a mixed time domain and statistical analysis of IMD mechanism. An example IEEE 802.11a OFDM signal is driving through five example solid state PAs, and the system performance is measured by error vector magnitude (EVM) and adjacent channel power ratio (ACPR).