OFDM Link Performance Analysis under Various Receiver Impairments

We present a methodology for OFDM link capacity and bit error rate calculation that jointly captures the aggregate effects of various real life receiver imperfections such as: carrier frequency offset, channel estimation error, outdated channel state information due to time selective channel properties and flat receiver I/Q imbalance. Since such an analytical analysis is still missing in literature, we intend to provide a numerical tool for realistic OFDM performance evaluation that takes into account mobile channel characteristics as well as multiple receiver antenna branches. In our main contribution, we derived the probability density function (PDF) of the received frequency domain signal with respect to the mentioned impairments and use this PDF to numerically calculate both bit error rate and OFDM link capacity. Finally, we illustrate which of the mentioned impairments has the most severe impact on OFDM system performance.