This paper presents a detailed analysis of the impact of power amplifier (PA) non-linearity on the performance of single carrier (SC) and OFDM systems in 60 GHz spectrum. The efficiency of the considered systems was analyzed by estimating values of the power amplifier output backoff needed to meet the requirements on the transmit spectrum mask (TSM) compliance and error vector magnitude (EVM). Different models of the PA including an experimentally measured model for the 60 GHz PA were considered. It was estimated that for many types of modulations and PA models, SC system can have up to 1.5 dB higher output power than OFDM system. However, for the experimental PA model accounting for amplitude modulation-phase modulation distortion in addition to amplitude modulation amplitude modulation distortion, the difference between the OFDM and SC output power levels was minimal, and OFDM even had approximately 1 dB better performance than SC for the BPSK modulation. A potential improvement in the transmit power due to application of digital predistortion techniques was estimated for both systems to be in the range from 1.5 to 3.4 dB.

This paper presents the results of an experimental investigation of 60 GHz wireless local area network (WLAN) systems in an office environment. The measurement setup with highly directional mechanically steerable antennas and 800 MHz bandwidth was developed and experiments were performed for conference room and cubicle environments. Measurement results demonstrate that the 60 GHz propagation channel is quasioptical in nature and received signal power is obtained through line of sight (LOS) and reflected signal paths of the first and second orders. The 60 GHz WLAN system prototype using steerable directional antennas with 18 dB gain was able to achieve about 30 dB baseband SNR for LOS transmission, about 15-20 dB for communications through the first-order reflected path, and 2-6 dB SNR when using second-order reflection for the office environments. The intra cluster statistical parameters of the propagation channel were evaluated and a statistical model for reflected clusters is proposed. Experimental results demonstrating strong polarization impact on the characteristics of the propagation channel are presented. Cross-polarization discrimination (XPD) of the propagation channel was estimated as approximately 20 dB for LOS transmission and 10-20 dB for NLOS reflected paths.