Impact of phase noise on single-tap equalization for fast–OFDM signals under generic linear fading channels

Abstract

In this correspondence, we present the performance evaluation of a low-complexity fast – orthogonal–frequency–division–multiplexing (F–OFDM) scheme, in the presence of phase-noise (PHN), working under the generic linear fading channels (like two-wave-with-diffuse-power (TWDP) multipath fading and modal dispersion in multi-mode-fiber optic channel). Here, a single-tap zero-forcing (ZF) equalizer is utilized to compensate the channel-impulse-response (CIR) without sacrificing data-rate, in which the discrete-cosine-transform (DCT) operation is replaced by the discrete-Fourier-transform (DFT) operation at the receiver. The phase noise variations are modelled by utilizing the random–walk paradigm, in which PHN is dependent on the model parameters/statistics. Therefore, main focus is on the impact of PHN on the performance of single-tap ZF equalization for F–OFDM signals. Simulation results are presented to illustrate efficiency and efficacy of underlying F–OFDM system, while working under TWDP, Rician and Rayleigh multipath fading linear channels. It can be inferred from results that the PHN severely affects/deteriorates the performance of F–OFDM based communication systems in terms of high bit-error-rate (BER), when the PHN variations are large. Moreover, the TWDP fading model is found to be quite appropriate for analyzing/investigating the BER performance of communication systems using the binary-shift-keying modulation technique.