• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea TC
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• v.47 no.2
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• pp.9-17
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• 2010

Recently, there has been much interest in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) for next generation wireless wideband communication systems. OFDM is a special case of multicarrier transmission, where a single data stream is transmitted over a number of lower-rate subcarriers. One of the main reasons to use OFDM is to increase robustness against frequency-selective fading or narrowband interference. However, in the radio systems it is also important to distortion introduced by high power amplifiers (HPA's) such as solid state power amplifier (SSPA) considered in this paper. Since the signal amplitude of the OFDM system is Rayleigh-distributed, the performance of the OFDM system is significantly degraded by the nonlinearity of the HPA in the OFDM transmitter. In this paper, we propose a canonical piecewise-linear (PWL) model based digital predistorter to prevent signal distortion and spectral re-growth due to the high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of OFDM signal and the nonlinearity of HPA's. Computer simulation on an OFDM system under additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels with QPSK, 16-QAM and 64-QAM modulation schemes and modulator/demodulator implemented with 1024-point FFT/IFFT, demonstrate that the proposed predistorter achieves significant performance improvement by effectively compensating for the nonlinearity introduced by the SSPA.