Joint compensation of I/Q impairments and PA nonlinearity in mobile broadband wireless transmitters

The main focus of this thesis is to develop and investigate a new possible solution for compensation of in-phase/quadrature-phase (I/Q) impairments and power amplifier (PA) nonlinearity in wireless transmitters using accurate, low complexity digital predistortion (DPD) technique. After analysing the distortion created by I/Q modulators and PAs together with nonlinear crosstalk effects in multi-branch multiple input multiple output (MIMO) wireless transmitters, a novel two-box model is proposed for eliminating those effects. The model is realised by implementing two phases which provide an optimisation of the identification of any system. Another improvement is the capability of higher performance of the system without increasing the computational complexity. Compared with conventional and recently proposed models, the approach developed in this thesis shows promising results in the linearisation of wireless transmitters. Furthermore, the two-box model is extended for concurrent dual-band wireless transmitters and it takes into account cross-modulation (CM) products. Besides, it uses independent processing blocks for both frequency bands and reduces the sampling rate requirements of converters (digital-to-analogue and analogue-to-digital). By using two phases for the implementation, the model enables a scaling down of the nonlinear order and the memory depth of the applied mathematical functions. This leads to a reduced computational complexity in comparison with recently developed models. The thesis provides experimental verification of the two-box model for multi-branch MIMO and concurrent dual-band wireless transmitters. Accordingly, the results ensure both the compensation of distortion and the performance evaluation of modern broadband wireless transmitters in terms of accuracy and complexity

Digital predistortion of RF amplifiers using baseband injection for mobile broadband communications

Radio frequency (RF) power amplifiers (PAs) represent the most challenging design parts of wireless transmitters. In order to be more energy efficient, PAs should operate in nonlinear region where they produce distortion that significantly degrades the quality of signal at transmitter’s output. With the aim of reducing this distortion and improve signal quality, digital predistortion (DPD) techniques are widely used. This work focuses on improving the performances of DPDs in modern, next-generation wireless transmitters. A new adaptive DPD based on an iterative injection approach is developed and experimentally verified using a 4G signal. The signal performances at transmitter output are notably improved, while the proposed DPD does not require large digital signal processing memory resources and computational complexity. Moreover, the injection-based DPD theory is extended to be applicable in concurrent dual-band wireless transmitters. A cross-modulation problem specific to concurrent dual-band transmitters is investigated in detail and novel DPD based on simultaneous injection of intermodulation and cross-modulation distortion products is proposed. In order to mitigate distortion compensation limit phenomena and memory effects in highly nonlinear RF PAs, this DPD is further extended and complete generalised DPD system for concurrent dual-band transmitters is developed. It is clearly proved in experiments that the proposed predistorter remarkably improves the in-band and out-of-band performances of both signals. Furthermore, it does not depend on frequency separation between frequency bands and has significantly lower complexity in comparison with previously reported concurrent dual-band DPDs