Adjacent Channel Interference Resistance of a Multi-Gbps Millimeter-wave WPAN System

This paper investigates the adjacent channel interference (ACI) resistance of a multi-Gbps single carrier wireless personal area network (WPAN) operating in the 60GHz millimeter-wave band. The significance of performance degradation due to ACI is investigated corresponding to varying factors such as types of modulation and radio frequency (RF) hardware impairments. The level of modulation scheme is found to change the system resistance against ACI considerably. RF hardware impairments such as power amplifier (PA) non-linearity and phase-locked loop (PLL) phase noise are also major factors affecting ACI generation. The tolerable ACI for WPAN system design is defined as the ACI that causes 0.5dB degradation in required signal to noise ratio (SNR) at bit error rate (BER)=10(-6). It is found that for a system employing pi/2 binary phase shift keying (BPSK) with PA output backoff (OBO)=3dB, ACI=13.5dB causes 0.5dB BER degradation. For systems employing quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) modulation, the tolerable ACI with PA OBO=3dB and 5dB are observed at 9dB and 15dB, respectively. For modulation schemes with higher levels such as the 16-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) system with PA OBO=3dB and 5dB, the tolerable ACI of 1dB and 5dB are observed. Next, the maximum ACI resistance is defined as the tolerable ACI by the system before the BER performance degrades and saturates towards 0.5. The performance of pi/2-BPSK system with PA OBO=3dB has maximum resistance against ACI up to 25dB before the BER saturates towards 0.5. Similar performance can be observed in QPSK system, but with PA OBO increased to 5dB. Systems with 16-QAM are found to saturate to BER=0.5 beyond ACI=10dB. Additionally, the presence of PLL phase noise is found to severely compromise the system performance particularly those with higher modulation levels. ACI as low as 0dB is found to cause error floor to 16-QAM systems.