Third Order Intermodulation Power Estimation for N Sinusoidal Channels

Abstract

In this paper analysis is given to find the third order intermodulation power given sinusoids are fed into a nonlinear device. A simple expression of the third order intermodulation power is given for the case that the center frequencies of the input sinusoids are equally spaced. Further, if the powers of the signals are equal, the expression becomes a closed form expression. The analysis will be helpful for communication system engineering in estimating the adjacent channel interference due to nonlinearity. Numerical results are presented for various values of (number of input channels). Though the analysis assumes the input signals to be sinusoids without phase modulation, the third order intermodulation power estimate serves as a good estimate for link budget computation purpose. For the case that the center frequencies of the input sinusoids are not spaced equally, the analysis can still highly likely be applied if we insert pseudo channels in between the real channels so that all (real and pseudo) channels are spaced equally (or approximately equally for approximation). In this case, the pseudo channel powers are set to zero so that the interference powers due to the pseudo channels will not be included in the analysis. In other words, the analysis is highly likely applicable without the constraint of the input channel center frequencies being equally likely. Simulations are also provided for the case that the input sinusoids are QPSK modulated.