Dirty RF

Future wireless communications systems are expected to provide ever higher data rates. Still, devices have to be produced at reasonable cost in order to be affordable to customers. The widely known impairments – ”dirt effects” – in analog RF tend to aggravate as we go for the large transmission bandwidths and high carrier frequencies that usually come with an increased data throughput. To date, RF components meeting these challenging requirements could still be built cheap enough such that the analog part of the system could be assumed to be ”perfect”. However, we can expect that in the future we will have to live with ”Dirty RF”. This paper gives an overview of the topic and presents analytical evaluations of the performance losses due to RF impairments as well as algorithms that allow to live with imperfect RF by compensating the resulting error effects using digital baseband processing.