Impact of RF circuit imperfections on multi-carrier and single-carrier based transmissions at 60 GHz

Circuit technology for 60 GHz is still limited, and impairments due to radio frequency (RF) circuit imperfections must be taken into account. Therefore, the candidate transmission schemes, in addition to multi-path fading, should be fairly resistant to RF circuit imperfections. In this paper, a performance comparison of multi-carrier (MC) and single-carrier (SC) based transmission schemes in the presence of DAC/ADC imperfections and amplifier nonlinearities, is carried out. It is shown that the SC scheme has substantially lower front-end requirements than its MC counterpart, while having the same overall system complexity.