Performance analysis of the effects caused by HPA models on an OFDM signal with high PAPR

This paper presents an analysis of the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) signal with high Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) that passes through different high power amplifiers (HPA) models. First, we present the main characteristics of the OFDM signal and the mathematical models of the HPAs. Then, we evaluate the performance of the OFDM signal with several HPA models in terms of the PSD (Power Spectral Density) and BER (Bit Error Rate) for different types of modulation and number of subcarriers. Finally, we show that for an OFDM-based system with N = 64 subcarriers and QSPK modulation, the Rapp Model outperforms the others whereas the Saleh model performs the worst with respect to the ideal HPA.