Hardware Impairments in Millimeter Wave Communications using OFDM and SC-FDE

Millimeter wave (mmWave) communications are recognized as a key technology in 5G architecture by achieving highly boosted data rate due to the large bandwidth available. For proper mmWave access design in practical systems, the impact of hardware impairments leading to performance degradations has to be considered adequately. In this work, several hardware aspects such as phase noise (PN), non-linear power amplifier (NPA), IQ imbalance and analog-to-digital converter (ADC) as well as digital-to-analog converter (DAC) resolution are studied and their performance is evaluated in mmWave channels. The respective influence on two air interfaces, namely, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and singlecarrier frequency domain equalization (SC-FDE), are analyzed and compared based on numerical results. It is shown that SC-FDE with minimum mean square error (MMSE) performs more robustly against most hardware impairments than OFDM. Although this less robustness is compensated by channel coding in OFDM systems significantly, SC-FDE with MMSE can still outperform OFDM in some coded cases.