Impact of wideband ADCs on the performance of multi-carrier radio receivers

Multi-carrier wideband radio receivers offer many advantages over their narrowband counter parts by pushing the digital boundary closer to the antenna. In multi-carrier wideband receivers, channel selection and filtering are done in the digital domain after analog to digital conversion (ADC); hence, such a wideband receiver requires only a single analog RF chain and a single wideband ADC for reception of many channels. The impact of the quantization noise of the ADC on the performance of a multi-carrier wideband receiver is very different from the impact of the quantization noise of the ADC in a traditional single-carrier receiver. In this paper, we derive analytical expressions that quantify this impact in terms of bit error rate (BER) for a Rayleigh fading channel.