Understanding the effects of power amplifiers on bandwidth efficient single-carrier and multi-carrier waveforms

Power amplifiers (PAs) convert low-power radio frequency (RF) signals into high-power RF signals. Most wireless communication systems employ power amplifiers in order to increase the operating range of the system. However, this conversion process can have some undesired effects on the underlying physical layer waveforms that are used for communicating. This paper will investigate these undesired effects on two types of waveforms: single-carrier and multi-carrier. Of main interest will be the effects caused by PAs to waveform out-of-band emissions, average and peak transmit power and received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)