Evaluation of BER degradation due to phase nonlinearity of SSPA on MC-CDMA signals

We investigate the influence of both AM/PM conversion and HPA (high power amplifier) nonlinearity by evaluating BER degradations, using an SSPA (solid state power amplifier) for the multi-carrier CDMA (MC-CDMA) system downlink. A simple model of AM/PM conversion to cover individual differences of SSPAs is given for the evaluation. It is shown that AM/PM characteristics have influence on BER degradations and individual differences of SSPAs are considerable for the IBO (input back-off) configuration. The results might give insights for the design of MC-CDMA systems.