Segmented Spline Curve Neural Network for Low Latency Digital Predistortion of RF Power Amplifiers

At present, we are the dawn of a new era for wireless communication systems. The new dynamic approach to the operation of cellular networks requires an extension of the essential input–output hardware mechanisms, to include intelligence. Traditional neural network structures can be used to embed artificial intelligence into cellular network base stations; however, standard network structures are not an optimal solution for these use cases. In this article, we present a neural network structure, which is specifically designed to provide a more accurate and computationally efficient solution compared with the previous neural network solutions for predistortion of RF power amplifiers (PAs). The proposed network structure is directly compared with alternative neural network solutions, which have been successfully employed for digital predistortion (DPD). The operation of this network is validated for DPD with experimental measurements with wideband signals using the latest generation of commercially available RF hardware. The novel network structure proposed in this work is demonstrated, in practice, to have better performance for a normalized mean square error (NMSE), an adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR), and an error vector magnitude (EVM) compared with the most popular previously published neural network.