Analysis on electrical breakdown in OFDM systems

An electrical breakdown problem in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems for Digital Video Broadcasting-Terrestrial (DVB-T) is investigated. An exponential model is used to calculate the density of free electrons within a fixed volume of air at atmospheric pressure. The results show that the change in electron density, caused by the ionization and the attachment, depends on the short term statistics of the OFDM waveform. The rate at which the density of free electrons increases depends on the magnitude of the power peak, and how long it is above the breakdown threshold.