Analysis and compensation of phase noise in vector OFDM systems

Vector orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (V-OFDM) for single transmit antenna systems is a generalization of OFDM where single-carrier frequency domain equalization (SC-FDE) and OFDM are just two special cases. It has been shown to be able to collect multipath diversity and thus generally outperforms OFDM. The performance of OFDM under phase noise has been extensively studied in the literature. These effects can be summarized as introducing a common phase error (CPE) and inter carrier interference (ICI) resulting in poor performance. The performance of V-OFDM under phase noise still remains uninvestigated and in this paper it is shown that phase noise in V-OFDM systems leads to a common vector block phase error (CVBPE) as well as an inter vector block carrier interference (IVBCI) effect. An expression for the signal plus interference noise ratio (SINR) for a V-OFDM system is derived and found to agree closely with simulation results. A pilot vector CVBPE based phase noise estimation technique is derived, and then combined with the maximum likelihood (ML) and the linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) estimators to estimate the phase noise. It turns out that compared with OFDM, V-OFDM systems can perform phase noise estimation with lower complexity. The decorrelation and cancellation techniques are then used to compensate for the phase noise impairment. Numerical results for both coded and uncoded systems with perfect and practical channel estimation are provided to validate the analysis and effectiveness of the proposed phase noise estimation and compensation methods.