Analysis of Gaussian phase noise effects in DFT-s-OFDM systems for sub-THz transmissions

The future generations of communication technologies envision the transmission of signals across the millimeter wave and sub-THz spectrums. However, the characteristics of the propagation channel at such high frequencies differ from what is observed in the conventional low-frequency spectrum with for instance, the apparition of stronger phase noise (PN) induced by the Radio Frequency (RF) transceivers and more especially by the oscillators. That is why there is growing interest in evaluating and adapting the 5G new radio (5G-NR) physical layer to the presence of PN. This article is dedicated to the study of discrete Fourier transform-spread-Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (DFT-s-OFDM) under uncorrelated Gaussian PN (GPN) impairments. We show that the presence of GPN induces two distortions: (i) a frequency-dependent random rotation of data, namely the subcarrier phase error (SPE) and (ii) a frequency-dependent intercarrier interference (ICI) that are analytically expressed. Then, we investigate the design of the adapted and optimal detection criterion according to the baseband model we derived in this paper. We demonstrate that (i) the proposed polar detector outperforms the conventional Euclidean detector and (ii) contrary to legacy OFDM, DFT-s-OFDM is a promising solution when strong GPN is involved.