Baseband compensation techniques for bandpass nonlinearities

Paper in proceedings, 2003

In this paper we present and compare several methods of compensating the nonlinearity of the RF front-end of a wireless system. Two baseband compensation techniques, namely predistortion and postdistortion (equalization) of the baseband signal are discussed and the problems associated with each one is addressed. Furthermore a combination of a predistorter and a nonlinear equalizer and also predistortion of oversampled baseband signal are analyzed. It will be shown that under realistic conditions with a frequently saturated amplifier and ISI channel, the latter two methods are able to compensate the nonlinearity up to a good extent, while the first two methods can only operate under certain assumptions for channel conditions and nonlinearity type.