A Testbed for Experimental Performance Evaluation of Multicarrier Waveforms in Presence of RF PA

This paper presents an experimental testbed to evaluate the performance of CP-OFDM and the most promising 5G multicarrier waveforms (MWFs) WOLA-OFDM and BF-OFDM in presence of a real RF power amplifier (RF PA). In particular, we focus on the in-band and out-of-band non-linear distortions and their effects on power spectrum density (PSD) and bit error rate (BER), respectively. Testbed results are obtained in a realistic laboratory experimentation with configurable universal software radio peripherals (USRPs) based software defined radio (SDR) prototype. Testbed results confirm that different waveforms lose rapidly their good properties when non-linear RF PA is considered. Waveform performances are validated and compared via both simulations and experimental measurements.