Impacts of amplifier nonlinearities on uplink performance in 3G LTE systems

As good candidates for uplink multiple access scheme in broadband wireless communication systems, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and single-carrier (SC) with frequency division multiple access (FDMA) have gained enough attention recently. However, the non-linearity of amplifier deteriorates the performances of these two schemes. On the assumption of non-linear amplifier applied, we compare the block error rate (BLER) and throughput performances between SC-FDMA and OFDM schemes in the framework of third generation (3G) long-term evolution (LTE) systems, where the adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) technique with slow power control is used. Our simulation results show that the impacts of non-linearity on two schemes are different and dependent on several factors including the power gain of the amplifier.