Performance analysis on the OFDM PHY of IEEE 802.11ad standard

In order to analyze the performance on the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex (OFDM) physical layer (PHY) of IEEE 802.11ad, a transceiver is designed based on the draft. The impacts of hardware impairments on the Bit Error Rate (BER) performance are studied, including phase noise and power amplifier (PA) nonlinear distortion. Simulation results indicate that phase noise makes a smaller effect on performance than PA nonlinear distortion. Additionally, 16-QAM and 64-QAM are more sensitive to hardware impairments than SQPSK and QPSK. To guarantee a good performance and get a high data rate, QPSK is a good choice in general, and 16-QAM is better when the backoff power of PA is relative large.