Efficient SER measurement method for OFDM receivers with nonlinear distortion

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system, known to be very practical for multipath environments, suffers from signal waveform with high Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR). As a consequence nonlinear distortion are introduced by the radio frequency (RF) components, such as amplitude clipping due to the low noise amplifier (LNA) in low cost receivers. This can significantly affect the symbol error rate (SER) performance of such systems. In this article we propose a method to efficiently estimate the SER performance of OFDM receivers in an industrial test environment, where the transmitter is considered ideal and neither fading nor significant noise are observed. To this end importance sampling (IS) techniques are employed. The application of the proposed method shortens the simulation/measurement time up to three orders of magnitude compared to the time needed by intensive Monte Carlo (MC) simulations. We also compare the IS estimated SER with intensive MC simulations and analytically derived results.