Bounding performance and suppressing intercarrier interference in wireless mobile OFDM

Abstract

While rapid variations of the fading channel cause intercarrier interference (ICI) in orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), thereby degrading its performance considerably, they also introduce temporal diversity, which can be exploited to improve performance. We first derive a matched-filter bound (MFB) for OFDM transmissions over doubly selective Rayleigh fading channels, which benchmarks the best possible performance if ICI is completely canceled without noise enhancement. We then derive universal performance bounds which show that the time-varying channel causes most of the symbol energy to be distributed over a few subcarriers, and that the ICI power on a subcarrier mainly comes from several neighboring subcarriers. Based on this fact, we develop low-complexity minimum mean-square error (MMSE) and decision-feedback equalizer (DFE) receivers for ICI suppression. Simulations show that the DFE receiver can collect significant gains of ICI-impaired OFDM with affordable complexity. In the relatively low Doppler frequency region, the bit-error rate of the DFE receiver is close to the MFB.