Impacts of Non-Ideal Analog Interfacing Factors on OFDM Baseband Signals

This paper focuses on selected unavoidable flaws and limitations of digital-analog interfacing that impact OFDM baseband signals. Investigations through a hardware setup are used to collect empirical data to observe the impact of gain error, I/Q amplitude imbalance, system resolution, and DC offset on OFDM demodulation. In addition, software simulations emulate the hardware results to estimate the error magnitude from each analog factor. Further more, simulations are used to investigate the impact of each analog factor. The factors considered include: DC offset, gain error, I/Q amplitude imbalance, and system resolution