Analytical Analysis of SER for Beyond 5G Post-OFDM Waveforms in Presence of High Power Amplifiers

This paper studies the performance of enhanced multicarrier waveforms in the presence of a nonlinear memoryless high power amplifier (HPA). In particular, we focus on the in-band non-linear distortions (NLD) and their effects on symbol-error-rate. First, we introduce a theoretical characterization of NLD caused by HPAs. Two HPA models are considered in this paper: 1) a 4-GHz realistic HPA, modeled using a polynomial model, and this model exhibits both amplitude-to-amplitude (AM/AM) and amplitude-to-phase distortions and 2) a Rapp model, which exhibits only the AM/AM distortion. Second, we present further discussions and comparisons on the different waveforms: the cyclically prefixed orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), the weighted overlap and add OFDM, the universal filtered multicarrier, the filtered OFDM, and the filter bank multicarrier based on offset-QAM. Then, we provide insights into the impact of in-band non-linear distortions caused by HPAs. The simulation and theoretical results are shown to be in agreement for different waveforms and various input back-off values.