Performance Analysis of SC-FDMA and OFDMA in the Presence of Receiver Phase Noise

In this paper we study the effect of receiver phase noise on single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA). We show that in both SCFDMA and OFDMA, common phase error rotates all the symbols by a certain angle and that the higher order frequency components of phase noise result in inter-carrier interference, or ICI. We then study the effect of phase noise on the performance of linear receivers that are often used in practice. In particular, we show that the amount of ICI affecting the sub-carriers depends closely on the allocation of sub-carriers among different users and prove that the performance of linear receivers in the presence of receiver phase noise deteriorates much more in the case of interleaved SC-FDMA than in the case of localized SC-FDMA. We identify the association of the significant phase noise components with the components of multi-user interference to be the fundamental reason behind the performance gap between interleaved and localized SC-FDMA. Index Terms phase noise, SC-FDMA, inter-carrier interference, linear MMSE receivers. Manuscript submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Communications on April 10, 2011. The material in this paper was presented in part at the IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC) 2011, Toronto, ON, Canada, Sept. 11-14, 2011. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS 2