Modeling ADC jitter effects in frequency-domain measurements

Timing jitter is commonly described as a random variable (RV) affecting each sampling instant in analog-to-digital conversion of signals. Once a digitized signal is transformed into the frequency domain through a discrete Fourier transform (DFT), each Fourier coefficient can be therefore regarded as a RV. In this work, the main statistical properties of the real and the imaginary parts of the DFT are derived under the assumption of timing jitter with Gaussian distribution. The proposed approach, however, can be applied to arbitrary distributions.