RF Analog Impairments Modeling for Communication Systems Simulation: Application to OFDM-based Transceivers

Preface

Modern digital communications transceivers can be decomposed into two main parts: the radio frequency (RF) analog front-end, which transmits and receives the analog signal, and the digital baseband, which is responsible for the digital signal processing (DSP) and data demodulation. The “virtual” frontier is delimited by the digital to analog conversion in transmission, and by the analog to digital conversion in reception. The digital baseband is commonly studied and simulated by communication system and DSP engineers based on standard requirements, which specify the modulation type and the system performance in terms of bit or packet error rate. On the other hand, the RF analog front-end specifications are often derived by the RF analog engineers themselves using, for example, Excel spreadsheets for calculating signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) or error vector magnitude (EVM) from basic and classical formulas based on dual- or single-tone tests historically coming from laboratory measurements. Actually, these RF analog analysis methods do not take into account the signal spectral properties and the transceiver bandwidth; consequently, there is a gap between the RF analog front-end specifications and the digital baseband simulations which often introduces misunderstanding during the transceiver design.

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