Waveform Parameter Design and Comparisons for Millimeter-Wave Massive MIMO Systems with RF Distortions

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive MIMO systems enable very high data rate applications for 5G systems, but they also face the challenging issues of strong RF distortions and constraints on computational complexity due to very high sampling rate. The choice of waveform and its parameter settings plays an important role in addressing these challenges. This paper studies orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and single carrier frequency domain equalization (SC-FDE) for mmWave massive MIMO systems under strong phase noises, frequency offsets, inphase and quadrature imbalances, power amplifier nonlinearity, and sampling frequency and time offsets. The effects of waveform parameter setting are investigated. The bit error rate, peak-to-average power ratio and power spectral density are evaluated. Our results indicate that the subcarrier spacing is a crucial parameter that influences the performance, and OFDM offers a slight bit error rate (BER) performance advantage over SC-FDE for both the downlink and uplink of mmWave systems under strong RF distortions.