Analysis of oscillator phase noise effect on high order QAM links

Abstract

In this work, the effect of oscillator phase noise on the bit error rate (BER) for high order QAM communication systems is analyzed. Two high frequency oscillators are designed, built and tested to get real phase noise data, and a BER simulation of a 1024 QAM signal through a super-heterodyne frequency down-converter is implemented using the measured data from the two oscillators as local oscillator sources for the down-converter. A third frequency source is also added to the simulation to visualize the dramatic effect of phase noise on the system BER analysis.