Performance Analysis of OCDM for Wireless Communications

Abstract

Orthogonal chirp division multiplexing (OCDM) was recently introduced as a new multi-carrier scheme based on the chirp spread spectrum (CSS) and shown to be more robust to interference caused by insufficient guard intervals. However, a thorough analysis of OCDM for wireless channels has not been conducted. Thus, this paper investigates the performance of OCDM affected by different impairments that are typical in a wireless channel and shows that uncoded OCDM performs better than OFDM and similar to single carrier block transmissions in multipath channels. Building on previous results, this study also shows that OCDM is more robust to time-burst interference (TBI) than its competitors and to narrow band interference (NBI) than OFDM because of spreading. However, OCDM is shown to suffer because of the loss of orthogonality caused by carrier frequency offset (CFO) and is analytically shown to have the same peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) as OFDM.