Impact of RF Impairments on the Performance of Multi-carrier and Single-carrier based 60 GHz Transceivers

The 60 GHz band, with a large unlicensed bandwidth, is an excellent choice for short distance high-speed communications. However, radio frequency (RF) circuit limitations at 60 GHz give rise to impairments such as phase noise, in-phase/quadrature-phase (I/Q) imbalance and amplifier nonlinearities. The candidate transmission schemes, in addition to multi-path fading, should therefore be fairly robust against RF circuit imperfections. This paper investigates the performance degradation as a function of various circuit parameters for multi-carrier (MC) and single-carrier (SC) schemes, which can be useful for:( i) performing a system cost and performance tradeoff comparison, (ii) identifying main performance bottle necks for MC and SC based systems.