Investigation of Blanking Nonlinearity in OFDM Systems

In this paper, we analyze the influence of a blanking nonlinearity onto OFDM systems in detail. We will derive closed-form expressions for the signal degradation and the interference, which is introduced by the blanking nonlinearity. The theoretical results will be validated by simulations, which illustrate the detrimental blanking influence in a descriptive way. In addition it will be shown how the results affect an OFDM receiver and how the receiver can be adapted to the blanking nonlinearity. Simulation results confirm a gain of 3 dB at BER=1·10 -3 for a 16QAM transmission, when adapting the receiver accordingly.