Consecutive Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing Symbols Research Articles

Performance Analysis of Low Power Interference Cancellation Architecture for OFDM System

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a wireless communication technology that is used for highly reliable and high data rate communication. In a multi-user OFDM system, the interference has occurred in the receiver side between the consecutive OFDM symbols. This interference reduces the performance of the OFDM system. To achieve good quality in received symbols the interference level should be minimized. The conventional cancellation system requires higher interference reduction time and power. These limitations of the conventional interference cancellation architectures for OFDM systems are overcome by proposing efficient and low power interference cancellation architecture. Hence, this paper proposes a novel and efficient architecture based on logic gates for interference cancellation in multi-user OFDM systems. The proposed design consist of multiplexers, inverters and OR gate. The heuristic parameters for the proposed cancellation architecture are computed by performing an XOR operation. Compared to existing architecture, the proposed interference cancellation architecture consumes 7 mW of power consumption in the Virtex processor, 33.59 mW of power consumption in Spartan 3E processor and 0.029 mW of power consumption in the CPLD processor. This proposed interference cancellation architecture consumes fewer hardware resources and consumes low power. The proposed system is designed using Verilog High Definition Language (HDL) and synthesized in Xilinx Project Navigator 12.1i. Further, this paper also proposes gate diffusion input (GDI) based implementation of proposed interference cancellation architecture to analyse a delay and power consumption compared to other logic style implementation.

Analysis and Mitigation of ICI Due to Gain Adjustment in OFDM Systems

Automatic gain control (AGC) is widely adopted in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems to compensate the significant variation of the received signal. In OFDM systems, the duration of the cyclic prefix (CP) is usually equal to the delay spread of the channel to minimize the system overhead. The inter-symbol interference (ISI) between consecutive OFDM symbols spreads over a large portion of the CP. The CP contaminated by the ISI should not be used to estimate the received power. If the duration of the remaining CP is shorter than the settling time of the AGC, then the gain adjustment will be carried out within the useful portion of the OFDM symbol. The subcarrier orthogonality is lost and the system performance is degraded by the resulting inter-carrier interference (ICI). In this paper, we propose a simple and efficient scheme to mitigate the ICI. The proposed scheme can be easily implemented in actual systems because of its low computational complexity. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme can increase the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio significantly compared to the traditional scheme.

Effective mirror-mapping-based intercarrier interference cancellation for OFDM underwater acoustic communications

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) techniques are promising for underwater acoustic (UWA) communications due to their robustness against large delay spread. However, OFDM systems in UWA channels suffer from intercarrier interference (ICI) caused by the Doppler effect. In this paper, we propose four low-complexity mirror-mapping-based ICI cancellation schemes in OFDM UWA communications without explicitly estimating ICI coefficients or carrier frequency offset (CFO), namely the mirror symbol repetition (MSR) scheme, the mirror conjugate symbol repetition (MCSR) scheme, the mirror conversion transmission (MCVT) scheme, and the mirror conjugate transmission (MCJT) scheme. We theoretically evaluate their performance by deriving their carrier-to-interference power ratio (CIR) expressions in multipath Rayleigh fading channels with CFO. The key idea of our proposed schemes is to employ data repetition within one or two consecutive OFDM symbols according to the mirror-mapping rules and apply the conjugate or conversion operations to remove ICI. Theoretical analyses and numerical results show that the proposed mirror-mapping-based schemes can effectively improve the CIR in comparison with the plain OFDM and the adjacent-mapping-based schemes. In addition, the effects of the channel length and the CFO deviation between two consecutive OFDM symbols are investigated. Finally, to demonstrate their benefits for OFDM UWA communications, these schemes have also been tested in a recent sea experiment conducted in Taiwan in May 2013. The decoding results validate that the proposed mirror-mapping-based schemes significantly improve the bit error rate (BER) performance of OFDM communications in UWA channels.

An Efficient Blind Estimation of Carrier Frequency Offset in OFDM Systems

In this paper, we propose a low-complexity blind carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation scheme for constant modulus (CM)-signaling-based orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. Provided that the channel can be assumed to be slowly time-varying, subcarriers having the same indexes in two consecutive OFDM symbols will experience nearly the same channel effect. This assumption enables us to derive a cost function that is determined by the sum of the products of the signal amplitudes on each pair of equivalent subcarriers from two successive OFDM symbols. The maximization process of this cost function makes it possible to find an appropriate estimate of the CFO. Over frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channels, the proposed CFO estimation method provides improved performance over existing techniques. Moreover, in the context of narrow-band noise and signal gain variations, the simulations demonstrate the robustness and immunity of our scheme.

Efficient OFDM Symbol Timing Estimator Using Power Difference Measurements

This paper presents an efficient blind symbol timing estimation scheme for orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems with constant modulus constellation. The proposed technique is designed to estimate symbol timing offsets by minimizing the power difference between subcarriers with similar indices over two consecutive OFDM symbols based on the assumption that the channel slowly changes over time. The proposed power difference estimator (PDE) is totally blind because it requires no prior information about the channel or the transmitted data. Monte Carlo simulation is used to assess the PDE performance in terms of the probability of correct timing estimate Plock-in. Moreover, we propose a new performance metric denoted as the deviation from safe region (DSR). Simulation results have demonstrated that the PDE performs well in severe frequency-selective fading channels and outperforms the other considered estimators. The complexity of the PDE can be significantly reduced by incorporating a low-cost estimator to provide initial coarse timing information. The proposed PDE is realized using feedforward and early-late gate (ELG) configurations. The new PDE-ELG does not suffer from the self-noise problem inherent in other ELG estimators reported in the literature.

Variable Length Cyclic Prefix OFDM using Multipath Delay Tracking

The Cyclic Prefix (CP) technique is widely used in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) systems. A CP of length greater than the channel order guarantees the orthogonality of the consecutive OFDM symbols. Therefore, the effects of Inter Symbol Interference (ISI) and Inter Carrier Interference (ICI) are cancelled. On the other hand, CP reduces the transmission efficiency.Conventional OFDM systems use constant length CP. For time varying channels, CP length may become shorter than channel order resulting in considerable loss in orthogonality and performance degradation. Otherwise, when CP length becomes much greater than channel order it results with time and power wasting, and hence decreasing transmission efficiency.This paper proposes the usage of a multipath delay-tracking module to provide the OFDM system with the actual channel order and accordingly the suitable CP length will be determined. Computer simulations show that the proposed system saves about 47.6% of the time and power spent by the same constant length CP OFDM system tested under the same conditions.

Carrier Frequency Offset Estimation for OFDM Systems Over Mobile Radio Channels

In this paper, a new technique is proposed for blind estimation of carrier frequency offset (CFO) in wireless orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems with constant-modulus constellations. The proposed scheme is based on the assumption that the channel slowly changes in the time domain with respect to the OFDM symbol duration. As a consequence, the channel effect on a given subcarrier in two consecutive OFDM symbols is approximately the same. Based on this assumption, a cost function is derived such that the power difference between all subcarriers in two consecutive OFDM symbols is minimized. Using Monte Carlo simulation, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme has superior performance in both static and time-varying frequency-selective fading channels. The proposed system can rapidly and accurately estimate the CFO using only three trial values, given that the CFO is less than half of the subcarriers' frequency spacing.

Blind carrier frequency offset estimation for constant modulus signaling based OFDM systems: algorithm, identifiability, and performance analysis

Carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation is critical for orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) based transmissions. In this paper, we present a low-complexity, blind CFO estimator for OFDM systems with constant modulus (CM) signaling. Both single-input single-output (SISO) and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems are considered. Based on the assumption that the channel keeps constant during estimation, we prove that the CFO can be estimated uniquely and exactly through minimizing the power difference of received data on the same subcarriers between two consecutive OFDM symbols; thus, the identifiability problem is assured. Inspired by the sinusoid-like cost function, curve fitting is utilized to simplify our algorithm. Performance analysis reveals that the proposed estimator is asymptotically unbiased and the mean square error (MSE) exhibits no error floor. We show that this blind scheme can also be applied to a MIMO system. Numerical simulations show that the proposed estimator provides excellent performance compared with existing blind methods.

A Sidelobe Suppression Technique by Regenerating Null Signals in OFDM-Based Cognitive Radios

In this paper, a sidelobe suppression technique for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based cognitive radios (CR) is proposed. In the OFDM-based CR systems, after the CR terminal executes spectrum sensing, it transmits a CR packet by activating the subcarriers in the frequency bands where no signals are detected (hereinafter, these subcarriers are called “active subcarrier”) and by disabling (nulling) the subcarriers in the frequency bands where the signals are detected. In this situation, a problem arises in that the signals that leak from the active subcarriers to the null subcarriers may interfere with the primary systems. Therefore, this signal leakage has to be minimized. In many OFDM-based wireless communication systems, one packet or frame consists of multiple OFDM symbols and the discontinuity between the consecutive OFDM symbols causes the signal leakage to the null subcarriers. In the proposed method, signal leakage to the null subcarriers is suppressed by regenerating null subcarriers in the frequency-domain signal of the whole packet as follows. One CR packet consisting of multiple OFDM symbols having null subcarriers and guard interval (GI) is buffered and oversampled, and then the oversampled signal is Fourier transformed at once and consequently the frequency-domain signal of the packet is obtained. The null subcarriers in the frequency-domain signal are zeroed again, and then the signal is inverse Fourier transformed and transmitted. The proposed method significantly suppresses the signal leakage. The spectral power density, the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) and the packet error rate (PER) performances of the proposed method are evaluated by computer simulations and the effectiveness of the proposed method is shown.

Low complexity channel estimation for space~time coded wideband ofdm systems

In this article, channel estimation for space-time coded orthogonal-frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems is considered. By assuming that the channel frequency response is quasi-static over two consecutive OFDM symbols, we develop channel parameter estimators based on the use of space-time block coded (STBC) training blocks. Using an STBC training pattern, a low-rank Wiener filter-based channel estimator with a significant complexity reduction is proposed. A simplified approach for the optimal low-rank estimator is also proposed to further reduce the estimator complexity while retaining an accurate frequency domain channel estimation. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed low complexity channel estimators for space-time trellis coded OFDM systems.