An Additive Noise Modeling Technique for Accurate Statistical Study of Residual RF Hardware Impairments

Hardware impairments are the inevitable limiting factors in radio frequency communication systems, and in particular in mm-wave, the impairments can severely affect system performance. In this paper, we propose an additive noise modeling technique for modeling and analyzing the residual hardware impairments, more accurately than previously done in the literature. We analyze the effects of joint residual phase noise and IQI in both transmitter and receiver by using additive noise modeling as a representation method and indicate how other impairments can be described in the same framework. We derive the signal to distortion plus noise ratio (SDNR) for both the joint and the individual effects of impairments and validate the formulations with simulations which also acknowledge the usefulness of the additive noise modeling as a mean for accurate hardware impairments study.