All communication transceivers suffer from nonlinearities in the analog components, such as amplifiers, mixers, ADCs/DACs, etc. Such nonlinearities lead to distortion of the communication signals, and may lead to the transceiver interfering with victims operating at neighbor frequencies.
The effects of nonlinearities have been a focus area since the start of digital mobile communication, and particularly the power amplifier in the transmitter has received much of attention. However, with 5G there are a few features that lead to a change in how nonlinearities are affecting the system. The usage of large antenna arrays, the introduction of millimeter‐wave frequencies, and the large signal bandwidths all lead to new effects due to nonlinearities – some beneficial, some problematic.
In this article, we present a comprehensive overview of the underlying reasons for nonlinearity and how to model them. We study the effects of nonlinearity in several scenarios, including single‐ and multi‐antenna transceivers, phased array and hybrid digital/analog beamforming, single‐ and multi‐carrier signaling, and concurrent multi‐band signaling, and we briefly discuss compensation of the effects.