Performance Analysis of a Six-Port Receiver in a WCDMA Communication System including a Multipath Fading Channel

Abstract

Third generation communication systems require receivers with wide bandwidth of operation to support high transmission rates and are also reconfigurable to support various communication standards with different frequency bands. An ideal software defined radio (SDR) will be the absolute answer to this requirement but it is not achievable with the current level of technology. This paper proposes the use of a six-port receiver (SPR) front-end (FE) in a WCDMA communication system. A WCDMA end-to-end physical layer MATLAB demo which includes a multipath channel distortion block is used to determine the viability of the six-port based receiver. The WCDMA signal after passing through a multipath channel is received using a constructed SPR FE. The baseband signal is then calibrated and corrected in MATLAB. The six-port receiver performance is measured in terms of bit error rate (BER). The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the transmittedIQdata is varied and the BER profile of the communication system is plotted. The effect of the multipath fading on the receiver performance and the accuracy of the calibration algorithm are obtained by comparing two different measured BER curves for different calibration techniques to the simulated BER curve of an ideal receiver.