Comparison of OQPSK and CPM for communications at 60 GHz with a nonideal front end

Abstract

Short-range digital communications at 60 GHz have recently received a lot of interest because of the huge bandwidth available at those frequencies. The capacity offered to the users could finally reach 2 Gbps, enabling the deployment of new multimedia applications. However, the design of analog components is critical, leading to a possible high nonideality of the front end (FE). The goal of this paper is to compare the suitability of two different air interfaces characterized by a low peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) to support communications at 60 GHz. On one hand, we study the offset-QPSK (OQPSK) modulation combined with a channel frequency-domain equalization (FDE). On the other hand, we study the class of continuous phase modulations (CPM) combined with a channel time-domain equalizer (TDE). We evaluate their performance in terms of bit error rate (BER) considering a typical indoor propagation environment at 60 GHz. For both air interfaces, we analyze the degradation caused by the phase noise (PN) coming from the local oscillators; and by the clipping and quantization errors caused by the analog-to-digital converter (ADC); and finally by the nonlinearity in the PA.