Integrated SC/OFDM Receiver Design for Efficient Phase Noise Mitigation in IEEE 802.11ad

Abstract

In IEEE 802.11ad, single carrier (SC) and orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) transmissions are supported as mandatory and optional transmission schemes, respectively. Both transmission schemes can be implemented with a minimum increase in complexity, because the frequency-domain equalization (FDE)-aided packet structure of IEEE 802.11ad enables SC receivers to operate using a mechanism similar to OFDM receivers. However, when the transmitter and receiver suffer phase noises, SC and OFDM receivers should mitigate the phase noise in different manners, because phase noise has different characteristics in time- and frequency-domains. Consequently, conventional phase noise mitigation methods for SC and OFDM transmissions are usually applicable only for a given transmission scheme, and these lead to an increase in complexity for integrated receiver designs for IEEE 802.11ad. To mitigate the phase noise of both transmission schemes with a minimum increase in complexity, we investigated an OFDM receiver design that can be added to the conventional SC receiver that includes precise signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) estimation for efficient phase noise mitigation. Link-level simulations were conducted to evaluate the packet-error rate (PER) performance of the highly modulated OFDM transmissions, 16QAM and 64QAM. The simulation results show that the SNR required to achieve 1% PER decreases by 1.2 dB and 0.8 dB for 16QAM and 64QAM, respectively, when the precise SNR estimation developed for SC transmission is applied.