MIMO-AFDM Outperforms MIMO-OFDM in the Face of Hardware Impairments

The impact of both multiplicative and additive hardware impairments (HWIs) on multiple-input multiple-output affine frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-AFDM) systems is investigated. For small-scale MIMO-AFDM systems, a tight bit error rate (BER) upper bound associated with the maximum likelihood (ML) detector is derived. By contrast, for large-scale systems, a closed-form BER approximation associated with the linear minimum mean squared error (LMMSE) detector is presented, including realistic imperfect channel estimation scenarios. Our first key observation is that the full diversity order of a hardware-impaired AFDM system remains unaffected, which is a unique advantage. Furthermore, our analysis shows that 1) the BER results derived accurately predict the simulated ML performance in moderate-to-high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), while the theoretical BER curve of the LMMSE detector closely matches that of the Monte-Carlo based one. 2) MIMO-AFDM is more resilient to multiplicative distortions, such as phase noise and carrier frequency offset, compared to its orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) counterparts. This is attributed to its inherent chirp signal characteristics; 3) MIMO-AFDM consistently achieves superior BER performance compared to conventional MIMO-OFDM systems under the same additive HWI conditions, as well as different velocity values. The latter is because MIMO-AFDM is also resilient to the additional inter-carrier interference (ICI) imposed by the nonlinear distortions of additive HWIs. In a nutshell, compared to OFDM, AFDM demonstrates stronger ICI resilience and achieves the maximum full diversity attainable gain even under HWIs, thanks to its intrinsic chirp signalling structure as well as to the beneficial spreading effect of the discrete affine Fourier transform.