On the Feasibility of 5G Carrier Synchronization for Super-QAM Constellations

Future wireless communication systems require increasing the data-rate, tremendously, given a limited bandwidth. One solution is to use super high order constellations in high signal to noise ratio (SNR) regimes. However, in practical systems, these constellations face many issues including hardware impairments and system non-linearities. In this paper we focus on the carrier frequency offset (CFO) and investigate its effects on the performance of an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) system that applies a super quadrature amplitude modulation (super-QAM). Our analysis show that although super-QAM constellations are more sensitive to CFO than low-order QAM constellations, on the other hand, we can take advantage of the high SNR regime that super-QAM constellations are used in and obtain an accurate CFO estimate and consequently reduce error vector magnitude (EVM).