Flexible Digital Predistortion for Future Spectrally-Agile Waveforms and 5G Radio Systems

In this article, we focus on the RF and digital front-end design and implementation challenges associated with future 5G radio access systems with special emphasis on spectrally contained waveforms and small-cell system scenarios. In general, filter bank based multicarrier (FBMC) type of techniques have various potential benefits due to their excellent spectral containment compared to classical OFDM(A). However, these spectrally contained waveforms lose their intriguing spectral properties when power amplifier (PA) nonlinearities are considered. Flexible and efficient digital predistortion (DPD) algorithms are thus considered an interesting solution in order to restore the spectral containment of such advanced 5G waveforms. Noncontiguous spectrally-agile transmission is another key feature of future 5G systems for increasing data rates and spectral allocation flexibility. However, the PA nonlinearities impose even more severe challenges in such noncontiguous transmission scenarios due to the resulting spurious intermodulation emissions that can easily violate the emission limits or even desensitize the own receiver in frequency division duplexing based systems. Furthermore, at the network deployment level, different small-cell concepts are expected to play a major role in future 5G networks. Unlike the ordinary macro base-stations, the digital computing capabilities in small-cell base-stations are much more limited. Furthermore, they should also adopt lower-cost and small-size analog RF components, while still maintaining high energy-efficiency. The afore-mentioned constraints, along with advanced 5G waveforms, call for flexible and low-complexity DPD solutions, a challenge addressed in this article. We report novel DPD methods with built-in capability to direct the linearization performance to pre-defined frequencies or subbands in a flexible manner, and demonstrate their good performance and complexity benefits in the context of non-contiguous FBMC transmission.