Local Oscillator Phase Noise Impact on M-ary Modulation Schemes

Abstract

This paper presents the impact of a local oscillator phase noise on digital modulation schemes based on bit error rate and error vector magnitude. The adopted methodology enables base band metrics estimation which is dependent of a specific communication standard. A generic local oscillator phase noise model is presented to evaluate the impact of different phase noise values on error vector magnitude and bit error rate. For a phase noise of -65dBc @ 1kHz the error vector magnitude changes from 7% to 12.8%. Increasing the modulation order leads to bit error rate increment for the same phase noise value.