Receiver Performances Considering Effects of Gain Control and Quantization in FDM-Based Narrowband Communication Systems

In wireless receivers, in order to prevent the saturation of a received signal in an analog-to-digital converter (ADC), an automatic gain control (AGC), which maintains the amplitude of an analog signal at an appropriate fixed level, is frequently employed. This paper discusses the effects of gain control and quantization in the AGC and ADC on the receiver performance in frequency division multiplexing-based narrowband communication systems. Each communication channel is very narrow in these systems, so the channels are packed without breaks, making it difficult to extract the desired signal using an analog bandpass filter. Therefore, other multiple communication signals are in-band interference signals in these systems. In comparison with a single interference signal, a peak amplitude of multiple interference signals is greater than the that of single interference signal given the same interference power. It is well known that signals having a large peak value cause the degradation of bit resolution due to the AGC and ADC processes. The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical and numerical analysis of the effects of gain control and quantization on the receiver performance in such an environment. The analysis results indicated that (i) in-band interference signals decreased the bit resolution of the desired signal amplitude because of these processes and (ii) the effects of these processes depend on the amplitude intensity and the number of in-band interference signals, given the same interference power.