Suppressing the OFDM CFO-Caused Constellation Symbol Phase Deviation by PAPR Reduction

The well-known major drawbacks of the Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM), namely, the transmitter versus receiver Carrier Frequency Offset (CFO), and the Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) of the transmitted OFDM signal, may degrade the error performance, by causing Intercarrier Interference (ICI), as well as in-band distortion and adjacent channel interference, respectively. Moreover, in spite of the utmost care given to CFO estimation and compensation in OFDM wireless systems, such as wireless local networks or the mobile radio systems of the fourth generation, e.g., the Long-Term Evolution (LTE), still some residual CFO remains. With this regard, though so far the CFO and the PAPR have been treated independently, in this paper, we develop an Error Vector Magnitude (EVM) based analytical model for the CFO-induced constellation symbol phase distortion, which essentially reveals that the maximal CFO-caused squared phase deviation is linear with the instantaneous (per-OFDM-symbol) PAPR. This implies that any PAPR reduction technique, such as simple clipping or coding, indirectly suppresses the CFO-induced phase deviation, too. The analytically achieved results and conclusions are tested and successfully verified by conducted Monte Carlo simulations.