A Novel Approach for Modeling and Digital Generation of RF Signals Distorted by Bandlimited Phase Noise

Abstract

In radar and communication systems, phase noise is one of the main causes of performance degradation. Phase noise increases the uncertainty in radar measurements and limits the achievable data rates in communication systems. When radio frequency (RF) signals distorted by bandlimited phase noise are modeled, the phase noise power spectral density (PSD) is usually approximated by a scalar root-mean-square (RMS) phase error derived from a simple integration of the PSD. This disregards the close-to-carrier noise excess. In this article, we show that this convention simplification describes the real behavior of phase noise inadequately. In addition, we present a simulation of realistic phase noise behavior. The novel additive colored noise (ACN) model requires a representative phase noise PSD of the phase-locked loop (PLL) signal generator phase noise to be modeled. The developed ACN approach is validated by comparing the measured PSD of different PLL signal generators with the respective simulated RF signals distorted by phase noise. As a simple metric for assessing the quality of the phase noise models, we use the influence of phase noise on carrier frequency estimation. It is shown that the novel approach shows a significant improvement in the agreement between the simulated and measured precision compared to standard additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) models. The results show that advanced phase noise models, as proposed in this paper, are necessary to adequately model and predict the performance of radar and communication systems.

Keywords

• Phase noise theory
• noise modeling
• phase noise
• frequency estimation
• noise analysis