An approach to mitigate the quantization distortion of the quantized OFDM receiver

Employing the low bitwidth, e.g. 1 bit or 2 bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC) can remarkably reduce the high power dissipation of ADC in the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) communications. However, the biterror-rate (BER) performance will be considerably undermined. In the paper, through deliberately reserving the subcarrier at the transmitter, the quantization distortion can be suppressed to achieve the BER gain. With the definition of the signal-to-distortion noise ratio (SDNR), the optimal reservation scheme achieving the maximum BER gain is also reported through formulating it as a single-variable optimization problem. Simulation results show that the proposed method can effectively mitigate the quantization distortion.