Comparison of single carrier and OFDM on 45GHz millimeter-wave communication system with hardware impairments

With the severe spectrum shortage in micro-wave frequency bands, millimeter wave (mmWave) frequencies between 30 and 300 GHz have attracted growing attention as a possible candidate for future wireless communication. The relevant transmission technologies for millimeter-wave wireless communication is an opening research. There exist two promising techniques in the physical (PHY) layer design of the millimeter wave wireless communication, one is single-carrier (SC) modulation transmission and the other is orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation transmission. In this paper, the performance for both SC and OFDM of the mmWave wireless communication system operated on 45 GHz frequency bands are investigated with taking hardware impairments including analog-to-digital converter (ADC) resolution, nonlinear distortion imbalance and phase noise into account. The simulation results show that SC is the more promising technique in supporting Multi-Gbps transmission in 45GHz mmWave scene under hardware impairments. Additionally, several key parameters, such as the quantization bit number, the output back-off (OBO), the gain, the phase imbalance and phase noise, are determined based on the referenced devices and simulation results.