Impact of Improper Gaussian Signaling on Hardware Impaired Systems

In this paper, we accurately model the hardware impairments (HWI) as improper Gaussian signaling (IGS) which can characterize the asymmetric characteristics of different HWI sources. The proposed model encourages us to adopt IGS scheme for transmitted signal that represents a general study compared with the conventional scheme, proper Gaussian signaling (PGS). First, we express the achievable rate of HWI systems when both PGS and IGS schemes are used when the aggregate effect of HWI is modeled as IGS. Moreover, we tune the IGS statistical characteristics to maximize the achievable rate. Then, we analyze the outage probability for both schemes and derive closed form expressions. Finally, we validate the analytic expressions through numerical and simulation results. In addition, we quantify through the numerical results the performance degradation in the absence of ideal transceivers and the gain reaped from adopting IGS scheme compared with PGS scheme.