Performance Analysis of Precoded Wireless OFDM With Carrier Frequency Offset

Abstract

Precoding is proved to be highly efficient to improve the bit error rate (BER) of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) in frequency-selective fading channels. Nevertheless, most of the work reported in the literature ignores the radio frequency impairments such as carrier frequency offset (CFO), which is known to be of significant impact on OFDM. Consequently, this paper considers the performance evaluation of precoded OFDM (P-OFDM) in the presence of CFO. The performance of the considered P-OFDM is evaluated in terms of the signal-to-interference plus-noise-ratio (SINR) and BER. Various channel models are considered and closed-form analytical expressions are derived for the exact SINR. The obtained analytical results, corroborated by simulation, show that P-OFDM is substantially more sensitive to CFO compared with conventional OFDM. Generally speaking, if the normalized CFO is about 18%, then OFDM will outperform P-OFDM for most practical channel models. It is also interesting to note that the subcarriers in P-OFDM may experience different SINRs, which is not the case for conventional OFDM. The paper also considers the SINR of OFDM after the equalization process. The obtained results show that ignoring the impact of the equalization process results in inflated SINR degradation.