BER analysis of single-carrier MPAM in the presence of ADC quantization noise

Noisy radio frequency (RF) circuits tend to degrade the system performance, especially in high frequency communication systems. The performance analysis of such systems is normally based on Monte Carlo simulations which are rather time consuming and provide little insight for system performance bottle necks. In this paper, an exact closed form expression for the bit error rate (BER) of M-ary pulse amplitude modulated (MPAM) single carrier (SC) schemes as a function of analog to digital converter (ADC) word length is presented. This expression is then used for the performance evaluation of MPAM schemes perturbed by Gaussian and ADC quantization noise (QN) in various fading scenarios. The expressions presented can also be used to determine the system performance in the presence of other RF imperfections such as phase noise in addition to ADC noise and thus provide the system designer with a handy tool for RF system design and optimization.