Spectral Re-Growth Suppression in the FBMC-OQAM Signal Under the Non-linear Behavior of a Power Amplifier

Abstract

Typically, the filter bank multicarrier with offset quadrature amplitude modulation (FBMC-OQAM) bears some impressive properties that make it popular as one of the substitutes to orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) for the upcoming technology of broadband wireless communication systems. Although FBMC-OQAM preserves the multicarrier modulation (MCM) features, its spectrum usually suffers from impairments when subjected to the nonlinear behavior of a power amplifier (PA) which results in spectral re-growth. Due to the spectrum limitation and low energy efficiency foreseen in the forthcoming 5G networks, it is vital to confine the spectrum of the FBMC-OQAM signal within the allocated band of interest. In this paper, the suppression of the spectral re-growth experienced on the FBMC-OQAM signal due to the nonlinear distortion effects introduced by the PA is investigated. The crest factor reduction (CFR) method in combination with an adaptive digital pre-distortion (DPD) are used. The peak windowing technique based on sequential asymmetric superposition windowing (SASW) algorithm is used in the CFR part while the least square estimation with QR-decomposition (LSE/QR) has been used as the coefficient’s estimator and adaptation algorithm in the DPD part. The performance of the two combined techniques has been evaluated on SystemVue2018 simulation platform. The adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR) and the error vector magnitude (EVM) have been considered as the performance merits. The simulation results show that the proposed techniques significantly improve the spectrum, first by reducing the PAPR of the FBMC-OQAM signal by about 1.5dB. Secondly, the spectral re-growth has been reduced by about -45.74dB adjacent channel leakage suppression and the error vector magnitude measure has been obtained to be about 7.12%. (-22.95dB). These values lead to better average input power of the FBMC-OQAM signal and improvement in the spectral efficiency and they are in accordance with the 3GPP standard for wideband signals in nonlinear systems.