Analysis of compensation methods for OFDM implementation effects

The impact of implementation effects on the received signal quality in an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system is investigated. This is done by taking into account the influence of hardware components, such as digital-to-analog (D/A) converters, amplifiers, filters and in-phase/quadrature (I/Q) modulator/demodulator. We focus on possible sources of errors in the signal generation and filtering process. Theoretical considerations are verified and demonstrated on a digital signal processing (DSP) system. Countermeasures to overcome the distortions resulting from the implementation effects are proposed and improvements of the received signal quality and the resulting bit error rate (BER) performance are shown.