2015 Fifth International Conference on Communication Systems and Network Technologies

Performance of OFDM in time selective Multipath fading channel in 4G Systems

Saurabh Dixit & Himanshu Katiyar
Department of Electronics and Communication
Babu Banarasi Das University
Lucknow, India
e-mail: saurabh2911@ieee.org; katiyarhimanshu@gmail.com
Interference(ICI). In single carrier modulation(SCM),
complex equalizers are required to compensate for ISI. The
increased complexity in MCM over SCM is compensated by
saving in equalization effort[4]. The resilience to frequency
selective fading and high spectrum efficiency provides
distinct advantages for OFDM. Fig. 1 represents the OFDM
spectrum where the available bandwidth is subdivided into
multiple frequencies sub-carriers which overlap in frequency
but there is no ISI. The advantage of OFDM will be greatly
diminished if orthogonality is not maintained between subcarriers[5]. The use of a bank of oscillators at different
frequencies for implementing the Fourier transforms was not
pragmatic. It resulted in additional hardware cost along with
drifts in analog components compromising the orthogonality
between sub-carriers. This problem was addressed by
Weinstein and Ebert in their seminal work where they used a
Discrete Fourier transform(DFT) to obtain modulation and
demodulation at the transmit and receive section[6]. Hence
in their scheme, they replaced the bank of oscillators by
digital signal processing technique. Peled and Ruiz
contributed significantly to the development of OFDM by
inventing the concept of Cyclic Extension(CE)[7]. A fraction
of OFDM symbol is appended at the beginning to combat the
effect of ISI. Since this fraction of the symbol is extracted
from the end, it is known as CE or Cyclic Prefix(CP). Apart
from negating ISI, addition of CP also results in a circular
convolution instead of a linear convolution. CP is an
overhead which reduces the spectral efficiency, however the
amelioration of ISI and ICI adequately compensates for the
reduction in Spectrum Efficiency.

Abstract With the growing demand for higher data rate

networks, OFDM has emerged as a key technology for 4G
standards like 3GPP LTE, IEEE 802.16m WiMAX and IEEE
802.11n WLAN. With its robustness to frequency selective
fading, high spectral efficiency and ease of implementation by
means of Discrete Fourier Transform(DFT), OFDM is a
cutting edge technology for Broadband mobile wireless. Along
with its compatibility with MIMO, OFDM is an attractive airinterface solution to meet the demands of 4G networks. In
mobile environment, channel is subject to both time and
frequency selective fading. Although OFDM is resistant to ISI
resulting from frequency selective fades, but it is quite sensitive
to time selective multipath fading. This time selective fading
causes ICI thus degrading system performance. For a
satisfactory performance of OFDM, it is imperative that the
sub-carriers remain orthogonal to each other. The orthogonal
behaviour of sub-carriers can be jeopardised due to two effects
namely Carrier frequency offset, and Doppler spread. In the
case of high Doppler spread owing to high mobility,
maintaining orthogonality between sub-carriers is a
challenging task. To keep a SIR of 20 dB, OFDM symbol
duration must not exceed 8% of the Coherence time of the
channel. In the case of Carrier frequency offset, which is
caused by the use of Local Oscillators, there is a frequency
shift of the received signal spectrum. This frequency shift of
the received signal spectrum compromises the orthogonality
between the sub-carriers. This paper reviews the methods to
mitigate the deleterious effect of time selective fading and
compares the simulation result of high Doppler spread with
that of small Doppler spread.
Keywords- ICI, ISI, LTE, MIMO, OFDM

II

I
INTRODUCTION
Technology is a leading indicator of standards. Hence,
the advent
of Orthogonal
Frequency Division
Multiplexing(OFDM) technology along with its practical
implementation marked the migration of Third
Generation(3G) standards towards Fourth Generation(4G). It
is a critical technology for 4G where multicarrier
modulation(MCM) provides two distinct advantages[1]. The
receiver of an MCM system causes much less noise or
interference as compared to that of single carrier. Secondly,
the long symbol duration used in MCM result in a much.
greater immunity to impulse noise and fast fades.OFDM is a
spectrum efficient kind of multicarrier transmission, where
the sub-carrier bandwidths overlap without being effected by
interference[2]. OFDM was introduced by Chang[3] in order
to provide a digital modulation scheme which can
circumvent Inter symbol interference(ISI) and Inter Channel
978-1-4799-1797-6/15 $31.00 2015 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/CSNT.2015.107

OFDM SYSTEM MODEL

Fig. 2 aptly represents the OFDM System model. A

wideband channel is down-converted into N narrowband
channels which are transformed into time domain from
frequency domain by using Inverse Fast Fourier
Transform(IFFT). CP is appended to each OFDM symbol
before being transmitted. At the receiver the inverse
operation is done to recover the Baseband symbol. The
output of the IFFT is the sum of information signals in the
discrete time domain as defined by (1)

x(k ) 

1
N

N 1

x

e j 2 pikm/ N

m 0

At the receiver, the signal is given by

421

(1)

Fig.1 OFDM Spectrum

x(m)  k 0 x k e j 2 pikm/N
N 1

frequency must be less than 0.04 in order to achieve a

Signal-to-Interference ratio(SIR) 20 dB. In [12] it is
suggested that if symbol duration  is chosen such that
  is very small then ICI is negligible. In [13] a concept
of equivalent single user is introduced which causes the total
ICI. Thus an average Doppler shift is measured based on the
Jakes model. After optimal receiver frequency adjustment
ICI can be minimized. In [14] an estimate of Doppler spread
is done based on finding the autocorrelation function of time
domain channel estimates over several OFDM symbols. It is
demonstrated that use of channel estimates in time domain
greatly improves the performance of Doppler estimates. [15]
investigates the effect of time selective multipath fading for
OFDM. It is opined that to achieve a (SIR) 20 dB the
OFDM symbol duration must be less than 8% of Channel
Coherence time[16]. Coherence Time(Tc ) is a statistical
measure of range of time over which a channel is considered
flat and is inversely proportional to maximum Doppler
frequency[17]

(2)

Thus a wideband frequency selective channel is converted

into a set of parallel flat fading narrowband channels. OFDM
is the modulation of choice for the 4G Long Term
Evolution(LTE) and WiMAX[8]. It benefits from efficient
implementation by means of the FFT, it also achieves high
transmission rate of broadband transmission with low
receiver complexity. It makes use of the CP to avoid ISI,
enabling block wise processing. Since OFDM uses
orthogonal subcarriers, no guard bands are required thereby
resulting in high spectral efficiency. Unlike the CDMA
systems which require strict power control, in OFDM
accuracy in power control is less critical because the
subcarriers are orthogonal, leading to high Spectral
Efficiency[9].
III

EFFECT OF DOPPLER SPREAD AND FREQUENCY

OFFSET

Tc 

Although OFDM is robust against frequency selective fading

due to large symbol duration, but at the same time, the
presence of large symbol duration leads to high sensitivity to
time selective fading due to the Doppler spread. OFDM
transmission over mobile communication channels is very
sensitive to time variations due to Doppler spreading. Time
variations within the transmission time of one OFDM block
compromise the orthogonality among the subcarriers giving
rise to inter-channel interference (ICI) which degrades the
performance of OFDM over fast fading channels[10].
Antenna diversity and trellis coded modulation are examined
in [10] to reduce the floor error caused by ICI. In [11] it is
demonstrated that ICI depends on normalized Doppler
frequency,   , where  is the OFDM symbol period and
 is the Doppler frequency. The normalized Doppler

1
fd

(3)

Since in a fast fading channel, there is high Doppler

frequency, hence the Coherence time is considerably
reduced. ICI can also be caused due to the Carrier frequency
offset(CFO). Frequency errors typically arise from a
mismatch between the reference frequencies of the
transmitter and the receiver local oscillator. The difference
between the reference frequencies is known as Carrier
frequency offset. This carrier frequency offset due to the use
of local oscillators at the mobile terminal results in loss of
orthogonality. To overcome the effect of ICI caused by
frequency offset, in [18] it is suggested to detect the
frequency offset of current symbol and use this value to

422

(a)

Fig.2 OFDM System Model

System bandwidth

10 MHZ

Sampling Frequency

11.429MHZ

Sampling Time

88nsec

FFT size

1024

Guard interval length

256

No of Pilot Bits

1024

Channel model

RAYLEIGH channel

Fig 2. OFDM System Model

estimate the offset of other sub-carriers by linear

interpolation. Thus using this estimated value the next offset
parameter can be predicted. By determining the next offset
parameter, the deleterious effect of ICI can be minimized.
Similarly, the effect of ICI due to Doppler spread can be
minimized by frequency correction.
IV.

V
CONCLUSION
Thus ICI results due to time selective fading when the
channel is time varying. An OFDM system is robust to
frequency selective fading but it is sensitive towards time
selective fading, which can compromise the orthogonality
of sub-carriers. In order to maintain orthogonality the ICI
must be compensated by making frequency correction,
estimating the frequency offset as well as ensuring that
OFDM symbol duration is considerably less than Coherence
Time.

SIMULATION RESULTS

Fig. 3 demonstrates the effect of Doppler spread on Bit

Error Rate(BER) with and without compensation. It is
evident that without Doppler estimation and compensation,
there is significant degradation in the performance of
OFDM. A correlation between transmit range and
frequency is also drawn, demonstrating an inverse relation
between the two for a given transmit power. Fig. 4 depicts a
scenario for performance of OFDM with and without
Doppler frequency. It is clearly evident that performance
degrades with high Doppler component. The simulation is
done with the following parameters
TABLE 1 SIMULATION PARAMETERS FOR OFDM

Fig. 3(a) Effect of Doppler on BER with and without compensation (b) Freq vs Range

423

[6]
[7]

[8]

[9]

[10]

[11]

[12]

Fig. 4 (a) BER for a time invariant channel

[13]

[14]

[15]

[16]

[17]
[18]

Fig. 4(b) BER for a time variant channel

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