Exact analysis of joint clipping and quantization effects in high speed WLAN receivers

An accurate method to analyze the joint effects of clipping and quantization in the A/D conversion in high speed WLAN receivers is presented. The model provides information about the spectral properties of the distortion noise, which allows the analytical characterization of the signal-to-distortion noise at the input of the demodulator. Oversampling, filtering, uniform and optimal non uniform quantization effects are taken into account. The optimal AGC working point is evaluated for each parameter configuration. The differences from the results obtained by the classical pseudo quantization noise model are highlighted showing that, due to the spectral characteristics, the gain introduced by oversampling is generally a few decibels lower than what foreseen by the classical theory.