Performance of edge windowing for OFDM under non-linear power amplifier effects

Abstract

Edge windowing is a windowing technique for Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) signals based on the idea of using shorter cyclic prefix (CP) and longer window lengths at the edge subcarriers while keeping the symbol length fixed. In this study, we investigate the performance of OFDM signals with edge windowing under non-linear power amplifier (PA) effects by observing out-of-band (OOB) emission characteristics, average error vector magnitude (EVM) and coded block error rate (BLER) performance. We explore whether the possible gains over conventional windowing in the presence of PA is possible. We show that the edge windowing can still provide improvements over conventional windowing in terms of OOB emission suppression under various PA models at the expense of increased average EVM, whereas the channel coding substantially mitigates the performance loss due to inter-symbol and inter-carrier interference (ISI-ICI) effects arising as a result of shorter CP length at the edge subcarriers.