The impact of nonlinear amplification on the performance of CDMA systems

An analytical formulation, separating the correlated and uncorrelated distortion spectrum when a wireless communication signal is processed by a nonlinear amplifier, is presented. The correlated distortion spectrum relates directly to gain compression or expansion while the uncorrelated distortion spectrum contributes to degradation of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The uncorrelated distortion spectrum is used to calculate the bit error rate (BER) when a nonlinear amplifier is followed by an AWGN channel. BER performance, predicted from the uncorrelated distortion spectrum, is in excellent agreement with simulated BER.