Intercarrier interference cancellation for wideband OFDM in high speed aerial vehicle communication

Abstract

It is well known that Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) systems suffer from intercarrier interference (ICI) in mobile environment due to loss of orthogonality among subcarriers caused by Doppler shifts. There exist many ICI mitigation techniques in the literature to improve the performance of OFDM systems. However, most of the existing ICI mitigation techniques assume the OFDM transmission bandwidth is narrow enough that the frequency offsets on all subcarriers are identical. In a wideband OFDM transmission or a non-contiguous OFDM spanning over large bandwidth, the Doppler shifts on different subcarriers are different, especially in high speed aerial vehicle communication systems. In this paper, we analyze the wideband OFDM system in high mobility environment where the frequency offsets vary from subcarrier to subcarrier. We then propose a novel ICI cancellation scheme to eliminate the ICI effect and offer the wideband OFDM system significantly improved BER performance. Simulation results in AWGN channel and multipath fading channel confirm the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in the presence of frequency offset and time variations in the channel, offering the best BER performance available which matches the BER performance of wideband OFDM system without ICI. To our knowledge, this paper is the first to address the ICI problem of varying frequency offsets across subcarriers in wideband OFDM system.