An Efficient Measure for Nonlinear Distortion Severity due to HPA in Downlink DS-CDMA Signals

This paper deals with the nonlinear distortion (NLD) effects of high power amplifiers (HPAs) on direct sequence-code division multiple access systems. Such a distortion drastically degrades the system performance in terms of bit error rate (BER) degradation and spectral regrowth. Much effort has been conducted to minimize NLD. A key requirement to do so is to define a certain measure for the HPA nonlinearity, which when reduced often allows NLD to also be reduced. Several measures were proposed such as peak-to-average power ratio, instantaneous power variance, and cubic metric. In this paper, we show that such measures are not closely related to NLD and their reduction does not always lead to optimum performance. Hence, we introduce an efficient measure, namely, nonlinearity severity (NLS), to characterize NLD effects, as an alternative to the existing measures. The NLS is characterized by having direct link to the system performance as it is formulated based on the signal characteristics contributing to BER performance and spectral regrowth. Additionally, a major advantage of the NLS measure is that it is linked to the IBO level allowing