Proceedings of the 46th European Microwave Conference
Comparison of Filter Bank Multi-Carrier and
Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing RFPA
Linearisation Requirement
Kibrom N Gebremicael, Stephen Wales
Kevin Morris, Roke Manor Research Ltd
Souheil Bensmida and Mark Beach Hampshire, UK
Communication System and Email: stephen.wales@roke.co.uk
Network Group
University of Bristol
Bristol, UK
Email:kibrom.gebremicael@bristol.ac.uk
Abstract—Increased network capacity and transmission speed
has driven the development of many different wireless standards.
Radio Frequency (RF) Technology has also been improving with
the changing wireless standards. Such developments demand
high linearity and power added efficiency from the RF Power
Amplifier (RFPA). 5th Generation wireless standard (5G) is the
next generation standard for mobile telecommunications. In this
paper we consider a waveform obtained using Filter Bank Multi-
carrier (FBMC) modulation, one of possible candidates for 5G,
and investigate its impact with respect to RFPA behavioural
modelling parameters. The measurement has been carried out
using 30 MHz to 2000 MHz, 25 W GaN wideband power
amplifier. Measurement has also been performed in the presence
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) RF signals
at the input of the power amplifier. And the result is analysed
in terms of crest factor, non-linear order, memory depth and
Adjacent Channel Leakage Ratio (ACLR) improvement.
Keywords—Adjacent Channel Leakage Ratio (ACLR), Crest
Factor, Digital Pre-distortion (DPD), Filter Bank Multi-Carrier
(FBMC), Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM).
I. I NTRODUCTION
In response to the ever increasing higher data rate demand,
different wireless industry standards have been proposed in
the past. As the standards continue to evolve, the RF sig-
nal characteristics and PA linearity requirement also keep
changing. The RF Power Amplifier constitutes one of the key
enabling components in the wireless transceivers, it is also a
main source of power consumption in these systems. Many
of the existing standards, such as IEEE 802.11 and 3GPP’s
LTE and LTE-Advanced wireless standard adopt OFDM. The
scheme has provided increased throughput and network ca-
pacity, however, the signal is characterized by high Peak-to-
Average Power Ratio (PAPR) value. Signal of this type can
potentially drive the PA into saturation resulting in strong
adjacent channel interference and poor Bit-Error Rate (BER).
The Fifth Generation (5G) wireless standard is anticipated to
increase the data speed on the order of gigabit rates [1]. FBMC
is one possible choice of modulation technique for 5G [2].
Unlike OFDM, FBMC does not use a square window in time
978-2-87487-043-9 © 2016 EuMA 1083
Michalis Kyriacou
University of York
York, UK
Email: Michalis.Kyriacou@york.ac.uk
domain, instead it consists of a band of filters providing better
spectral containment per sub-carrier and reduces the out-of-
band emission [3],[4]. The scheme is still a multi-carrier signal
and possesses a high PAPR. High PA linearity will still be a
requirement. 5G is expected to utilise higher frequency carriers
and wider bandwidth [5]. When the PA operates in a wideband
application, it exhibits memory effect.
A significant amount of research effort has been directed
towards improving the power added efficiency of RF power
amplifiers and also their linearity in meeting ever more strin-
gent requirements upon out of band emissions with waveforms
possessing a high peak to average power ratio. Digital Pre-
distortion (DPD) is now commonplace in wireless infrastruc-
ture transmitters to allow amplifiers to operate with reduced
back-off whilst meeting adjacent channel leakage requirements
arising from non-linear distortion in the amplifier [6][7]. DPD
operates by characterising the distortion in the power amplifier
and applying an inverse model. Consequently it needs the out-
put of the PA acquired over the bandwidth required to estimate
the behavioural model of the amplifier. As signal bandwidths
increase, this can place a high demand upon Analogue to
Digital Converters (ADC) and associated signal processing to
perform pre-distortion. Crest Factor Reduction (CFR) increases
the efficiency of the amplifier through controlled peak clipping
[8] but this can also increase the complexity of the system as
it requires the addition of extra system for peak reduction. In
order to preserve the lower sidelobe level of FBMC after the
RFPA, the performance required from the existing linearisation
technique is expected to be increased. This paper provides
experimental validation of this.
II. D ISTORTION C HARACTERISATION
In order to fully exploit the potential of DPD, it needs
to analytically model the behaviour of the PA. The amplifier
exhibits memory effects when operating on wideband RF
signal, moreover, the concurrent multi-band operation and the
spectral gab variation between the bands impacts the model [9].
The Volterra model in equation (1) can be used to characterise
the non-linear behaviour of the RFPA accounting for memory
4–6 Oct 2016, London, UK
effects [10],[11]. However its computational complexity means
that it is rarely applied in practice: the complexity increases
exponentially as the non-linearity degree and the memory
depth value increase.

 K
P  K
 P

y(n) = ... hp (i1 , ..., ip ) x(n − ij ) (1)
p=1 ii =0 ip =0 j=1

where:
x(n) Input Fig. 1. Measurement Set-Up and RFMD’s RF3833 PA
y(n) Output
hp (i1 , ..., ip ) Discrete Time Volterra kernel
K Memory depth
P Non-linearity order of the polynomial

Several simplified versions of the Volterra model have

been applied to amplifier pre-distortion, of which the
memory polynomial model given in equation (2) is the
simplest [12],[13].

P 
 K
y(n) = a2p−1,k x(n − k)|x(n − k)|2(p−1) (2)
p=1 k=0

Where a2p−1,q is a Complex coefficient

III. M EASUREMENT PROCEDURE AND R ESULT

To investigate the impact of the signal characteristic on
the PA’s behavioural model, a concurrent dual-band RF input
signal which constitutes two of each: 1MHz FBMC, 10 MHz
FBMC and 10 MHz LTE RF signals have been applied to
the RFPA separately. Each RF signal was generated using
a Rohde and Schwartz SMU200A vector signal generator,
and then power combined before being fed into an RFMD
RF3833 25W 30 MHz to 2000 MHz GaN Wide-Band Power
Amplifier. Rohde and Schwartz’s FSQ26 vector signal analyzer
and IQWizard have been used to capture the content of each
band separately. The acquired baseband sequence is processed
using Matlab code for non-linear model extraction and DPD
calculation. A photograph of the measurement set-up and the
PA module are shown in Figure 1. The behavioural modelling
and DPD has been carried out when the carriers are placed at
850 MHz and 1 GHz.
The PA exhibits memoryless effect whenever a narrow band
RF signal is fed into it. As shown in Figure 2, even if the
individual bands constitutes narrowband RF signal, memory
effects are present with the concurrent multi-band operation.
Such PA characteristics need to be compensated for along with
the non-linear effect of the PA. The other equally important
outcome is the change in the crest factor. The Complementary
Cumulative Distribution Function (CCDF) graph shown in Fig-
ure 3 is when a concurrent dual band signal each constituting
1MHz FBMC narrowband signal is presented to the PA. The
PAPR value of each signal prior to combining was 10.58 dB,
but after combining this value has increased by almost 3 dB.
Such effect requires to consider the number of bands that
the PA can run simultaneously; because, as the PAPR value
increases, so does the PA linearity requirement.
Fig. 2. PA Characteristics and Modelling
The absolute ACLR at the FBMC source (without ampli-
fication) was -67.74 dB. When OFDM signal was used, the
absolute ACLR in the previous scenario was measured to be
-65.22 dB. The spectrum in Figure 4 shows the PA’s response
to a concurrent dual band input signal. Each constitutes 10
MHz band and consists of an FBMC and LTE signals. As
can be seen from this figure, ACLR in the FBMC signal is
lower than it was in OFDM. This may well be due to the
better spectral containment in the FBMC. The result shown
in Figure 5 is obtained when the memory depth and the non-
linearity order in equation 1 are set to one and five respectively.
The measurement is carried out in the presence of two 10
MHz channels, the result is summarised in Table I. The results
are obtained when the the memory depth value is set at one.
Channel A and B in Table I refers to each bands at 850 MHz
and 1 GHz respectively. As can be seen from Figure 5 and
Table I, the level of ACLR improvement obtained during DPD
application is also different. From the results presented here
FBMC requires a reduced non-linearity order to achieve similar
levels of improvement in ACLR from the application of DPD
compared to OFDM.
IV. C ONCLUSION
The advancing wireless standards are increasingly de-
manding high linearity from the PA. Progress in wideband
communications requires the PA to run in concurrent multi-

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 Fig. 5. PA Response to FBMC waveform With and Without DPD

signal. Memory polynomial behavioural modelling and DPD

has applied while the FBMC and OFDM signals are presented
to the PA. DPD application to the OFDM signal showed better
ACLR performance at increased polynomial complexity when
compared to DPD result in the FBMC signal.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Fig. 3. CCDF plot
This work is supported by the U.K. Engineering and Physi-
cal Sciences Research Council Centre for Doctoral Training in
Communications under Grants EP/I028153/1, EP/K035746/1
and Roke Manor Research Ltd, UK.

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