Impact of phase noise on single-tap equalization for fast-OFDM signals under generic linear fading channels

In this correspondence, we present the performance evaluation of a low-complexity fast - orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexing (F-OFDM) scheme, in the presence of phase-noise (PHN), working under the generic linear fading channels (like two-wave-with-diffuse-power (TWDP) multipath fading and modal dispersion in multi-mode-fiber optic channel). Here, a single-tap zero-forcing (ZF) equalizer is utilized to compensate the channel-impulse-response (CIR) without sacrificing data-rate, in which the discrete-cosine-transform (DCT) operation is replaced by the discrete-Fourier-transform (DFT) operation at the receiver. The phase noise variations are modelled by utilizing the random-walk paradigm, in which PHN is dependent on the model parameters/statistics. Therefore, main focus is on the impact of PHN on the performance of single-tap ZF equalization for F-OFDM signals. Simulation results are presented to illustrate efficiency and efficacy of underlying F-OFDM system, while working under TWDP, Rician and Rayleigh multipath fading linear channels. It can be inferred from results that the PHN severely affects/deteriorates the performance of F-OFDM based communication systems in terms of high bit-error-rate (BER), when the PHN variations are large. Moreover, the TWDP fading model is found to be quite appropriate for analyzing/investigating the BER performance of communication systems using the binary-shift-keying modulation technique.