Efficiency Maximization for Battery-Powered OFDM Transmitter via Amplifier Operating Point Adjustment

While Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a dominating spectrum access technology in modern, wideband access networks, it is important to maximize its transmission efficiency considering the underlying radio front-end characteristics. A practical front-end contains nonlinear components, e.g., a Power Amplifier (PA), resulting in nonlinear distortion being injected into OFDM band deteriorating symbols detection. A PA operating point, defined here by Input Back-Off (IBO), can be adjusted to balance the wanted signal power and nonlinear distortion power. While it is the most common to maximize the spectral efficiency (SE), recently, energy efficiency (EE) maximization gained momentum. However, EE maximization requires, in addition to PA nonlinearity modeling, modeling of the power consumption of the PA and all other transmitter components. While it is commonly overlooked, if a battery is used to power the transmitter, its model should be considered as well. This paper derives mathematical expressions for EE and SE of an OFDM transmitter considering Rapp and soft-limiter models of PA nonlinearity, class A, class B, and perfect PA power consumption models, and two battery models: perfect and worst-case. While closed-form expressions cannot be obtained for most of the derived integrals, numerical methods have been used to obtain the optimal IBO value in each case. The numerical results show, in addition to optimal IBO values, the expected Signal-to-Noise and Distortion Ratios (SNDRs). It is shown that the optimal IBO value changes significantly with the wireless channel properties, utilized hardware architecture, or the utilized optimization goal. As such, the proposed optimization is an important topic for 5G and beyond transmitters.