Effect of smooth nonlinear distortion on OFDM symbol error rate

Nonlinear distortion of OFDM signals can significantly increase the receiver symbol error rate (SER). Currently, distortion analyses rely on simulation, not yielding insight into the problem, or apply to specific nonlinearities only. In this letter, general analytic results are presented on the errors resulting from distortion. The results are applicable to smooth nonlinear distortion of an OFDM signal, which is the most common distortion. Simple analytical expressions are derived which allows a designer to determine the SER before performing simulations. Further, it is shown that the error on each OFDM subcarrier is approximately equally large.