ICI Cancellation in OFDM Systems by Frequency Offset Reduction

With the rapid growth of digital communication in recent years, the need for high speed data transmission is increased. Moreover, future wireless systems are expected to support a wide range of services which includes video, data and voice. OFDM is a promising candidate for achieving high data rates in mobile environment because of its multicarrier modulation technique and ability to convert a frequency selective fading channel into several nearly flat fading channels. Now OFDM is being widely used in wireless communications standards, such as IEEE 802.11a, the multimedia mobile access communication (MMAC), and the HIPERLAN/2. However, one of the main disadvantages of OFDM is its sensitivity against carrier frequency offset which causes inter carrier interference (ICI). A well-known problem of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), however, is its sensitivity to frequency offset between the transmitted and received signals, which may be caused by Doppler shift in the channel, or by the difference between the transmitter and receiver local oscillator frequencies. This carrier frequency offset causes loss of orthogonality between sub-carriers and the signals transmitted on each carrier are not independent of each other. The orthogonality of the carriers is no longer maintained, which results in inter-carrier interference (ICI). The undesired ICI degrades the performance of the system. Depending on the Doppler spread in the channel and the block length chosen for transmission, ICI can potentially cause a severe deterioration of quality of service (QOS) in OFDM systems. ICI mitigation techniques are essential in improving the performance of an OFDM system in an environment which induces frequency offset error in the transmitted signal. The comparisons of these schemes in terms of various parameters will be useful in determining the choice of ICI mitigation techniques for different applications and mobile environments. This project investigates an efficient ICI cancellation method termed ICI self-cancellation scheme for combating the impact of ICI on OFDM systems. The ICI self-cancellation scheme is a technique in which redundant data is transmitted onto adjacent sub-carriers such that the ICI between adjacent sub-carriers cancels out at the receiver. The main idea is one data symbol is modulated onto a group of adjacent subcarriers with a group of weighting coefficients. By doing so, the ICI signals generated within a group can be self-cancelled each other. At the receiver side, by linearly combining the received signals on these subcarriers with proposed coefficients, the residual ICI contained in the received signals can then be further reduced. Although the proposed scheme causes a reduction in bandwidth efficiency, it can be compensated, by using larger signal alphabet sizes in modulation. The average carrier-to-interference power ratio (CIR) is used as the ICI level indicator, and a theoretical CIR expression is derived for the proposed scheme. The proposed scheme provides significant CIR improvement, which has been studied theoretically and supported by simulations. Simulation results show that under the condition of the same bandwidth efficiency and larger frequency offsets, the proposed OFDM system using the ICI self-cancellation scheme per- forms much better than standard OFDM systems in AWGN channel with large Doppler frequencies. In addition, since no channel equalization is needed for reducing ICI, the proposed scheme is therefore beneficial in implementation issue without increasing system complexit

Intercarrier Interference Suppression for the OFDM Systems in Time-Varying Multipath Fading Channels

Due to its spectral efficiency and robustness over the multipath channels, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has served as one of the major modulation schemes for the modern communication systems. In the future, the wireless OFDM systems are expected to operate at high carrier-frequencies, high speed and high throughput mobile reception, where the fasting time-varying fading channels are encountered. The channel variation destroys the orthogonality among the subcarriers and leads to the intercarrier interference (ICI). ICI poses a significant limitation to the wireless OFDM systems. The aim of this dissertation is to find an efficient method of providing reliable communication using OFDM in the fast time-varying fading channel scenarios. First, we investigate the OFDM performance in the situation of time-varying mobile channels in the presence of multiple Doppler frequency shifts. A new mathematical framework of the ICI effect is derived. The simulation results show that ICI induces an irreducible error probability floor, which in proportional to the Doppler frequency shifts. Furthermore, it is observed that ICI power arises from a few adjacent subcarriers. This observation motivates us to design the low-complexity Q-tap equalizers, namely, Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) linear equalizer and Decision Feedback (DF) non-linear equalizer to mitigate the ICI. Simulation results show that both Q-tap equalizers can improve the system performance in the sense of symbol error rate (SER). To employ these equalizers, the channel state information is also required. In this dissertation, we also design a pilot-aided channel estimation via Wiener filtering for a time-varying Wide-sense Stationary Uncorrelated Scatterers (WSSUS) channel model. The channel estimator utilizes that channel statistical properties. Our proposed low-complexity ICI suppression scheme, which incorporates the Q-tap equalizer with our proposed channel estimator, can significantly improve the performance of the OFDM systems in a fast time-varying fading channels. At the last part of the dissertation, an alternative ICI mitigation approach, which is based on the ICI self-cancellation coding, is also discussed. The EM-based approach, which solves the phase and amplitude ambiguities associated with this approach, is also introduced

Narrowband Interference Suppression in Wireless OFDM Systems

Signal distortions in communication systems occur between the transmitter and the receiver; these distortions normally cause bit errors at the receiver. In addition interference by other signals may add to the deterioration in performance of the communication link. In order to achieve reliable communication, the effects of the communication channel distortion and interfering signals must be reduced using different techniques. The aim of this paper is to introduce the fundamentals of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), to review and examine the effects of interference in a digital data communication link and to explore methods for mitigating or compensating for these effects

Iterative Receiver for MIMO-OFDM System with ICI Cancellation and Channel Estimation

As a multi-carrier modulation scheme, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) technique can achieve high data rate in frequency-selective fading channels by splitting a broadband signal into a number of narrowband signals over a number of subcarriers, where each subcarrier is more robust to multipath. The wireless communication system with multiple antennas at both the transmitter and receiver, known as multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, achieves high capacity by transmitting independent information over different antennas simultaneously. The combination of OFDM with multiple antennas has been considered as one of most promising techniques for future wireless communication systems. The challenge in the detection of a space-time signal is to design a low-complexity detector, which can efficiently remove interference resulted from channel variations and approach the interference-free bound. The application of iterative parallel interference canceller (PIC) with joint detection and decoding has been a promising approach. However, the decision statistics of a linear PIC is biased toward the decision boundary after the first cancellation stage. In this thesis, we employ an iterative receiver with a decoder metric, which considerably reduces the bias effect in the second iteration, which is critical for the performance of the iterative algorithm. Channel state information is required in a MIMO-OFDM system signal detection at the receiver. Its accuracy directly affects the overall performance of MIMO-OFDM systems. In order to estimate the channel in high-delay-spread environments, pilot symbols should be inserted among subcarriers before transmission. To estimate the channel over all the subcarriers, various types of interpolators can be used. In this thesis, a linear interpolator and a trigonometric interpolator are compared. Then we propose a new interpolator called the multi-tap method, which has a much better system performance. In MIMO-OFDM systems, the time-varying fading channels can destroy the orthogonality of subcarriers. This causes serious intercarrier interference (ICI), thus leading to significant system performance degradation, which becomes more severe as the normalized Doppler frequency increases. In this thesis, we propose a low-complexity iterative receiver with joint frequency- domain ICI cancellation and pilot-assisted channel estimation to minimize the effect of time-varying fading channels. At the first stage of receiver, the interference between adjacent subcarriers is subtracted from received OFDM symbols. The parallel interference cancellation detection with decision statistics combining (DSC) is then performed to suppress the interference from other antennas. By restricting the interference to a limited number of neighboring subcarriers, the computational complexity of the proposed receiver can be significantly reduced. In order to construct the time variant channel matrix in the frequency domain, channel estimation is required. However, an accurate estimation requiring complete knowledge of channel time variations for each block, cannot be obtained. For time- varying frequency-selective fading channels, the placement of pilot tones also has a significant impact on the quality of the channel estimates. Under the assumption that channel variations can be approximated by a linear model, we can derive channel state information (CSI) in the frequency domain and estimate time-domain channel parameters. In this thesis, an iterative low-complexity channel estimation method is proposed to improve the system performance. Pilot symbols are inserted in the transmitted OFDM symbols to mitigate the effect of ICI and the channel estimates are used to update the results of both the frequency domain equalizer and the PICDSC detector in each iteration. The complexity of this algorithm can be reduced because the matrices are precalculated and stored in the receiver when the placement of pilots symbols is fixed in OFDM symbols before transmission. Finally, simulation results show that the proposed MIMO-OFDM iterative receiver can effectively mitigate the effect of ICI and approach the ICI-free performance over time-varying frequency-selective fading channels

Performance enhancement for LTE and beyond systems

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyWireless communication systems have undergone fast development in recent years. Based on GSM/EDGE and UMTS/HSPA, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) specified the Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard to cope with rapidly increasing demands, including capacity, coverage, and data rate. To achieve this goal, several key techniques have been adopted by LTE, such as Multiple-Input and Multiple-Output (MIMO), Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM), and heterogeneous network (HetNet). However, there are some inherent drawbacks regarding these techniques. Direct conversion architecture is adopted to provide a simple, low cost transmitter solution. The problem of I/Q imbalance arises due to the imperfection of circuit components; the orthogonality of OFDM is vulnerable to carrier frequency offset (CFO) and sampling frequency offset (SFO). The doubly selective channel can also severely deteriorate the receiver performance. In addition, the deployment of Heterogeneous Network (HetNet), which permits the co-existence of macro and pico cells, incurs inter-cell interference for cell edge users. The impact of these factors then results in significant degradation in relation to system performance. This dissertation aims to investigate the key techniques which can be used to mitigate the above problems. First, I/Q imbalance for the wideband transmitter is studied and a self-IQ-demodulation based compensation scheme for frequencydependent (FD) I/Q imbalance is proposed. This combats the FD I/Q imbalance by using the internal diode of the transmitter and a specially designed test signal without any external calibration instruments or internal low-IF feedback path. The instrument test results show that the proposed scheme can enhance signal quality by 10 dB in terms of image rejection ratio (IRR). In addition to the I/Q imbalance, the system suffers from CFO, SFO and frequency-time selective channel. To mitigate this, a hybrid optimum OFDM receiver with decision feedback equalizer (DFE) to cope with the CFO, SFO and doubly selective channel. The algorithm firstly estimates the CFO and channel frequency response (CFR) in the coarse estimation, with the help of hybrid classical timing and frequency synchronization algorithms. Afterwards, a pilot-aided polynomial interpolation channel estimation, combined with a low complexity DFE scheme, based on minimum mean squared error (MMSE) criteria, is developed to alleviate the impact of the residual SFO, CFO, and Doppler effect. A subspace-based signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) estimation algorithm is proposed to estimate the SNR in the doubly selective channel. This provides prior knowledge for MMSE-DFE and automatic modulation and coding (AMC). Simulation results show that this proposed estimation algorithm significantly improves the system performance. In order to speed up algorithm verification process, an FPGA based co-simulation is developed. Inter-cell interference caused by the co-existence of macro and pico cells has a big impact on system performance. Although an almost blank subframe (ABS) is proposed to mitigate this problem, the residual control signal in the ABS still inevitably causes interference. Hence, a cell-specific reference signal (CRS) interference cancellation algorithm, utilizing the information in the ABS, is proposed. First, the timing and carrier frequency offset of the interference signal is compensated by utilizing the cross-correlation properties of the synchronization signal. Afterwards, the reference signal is generated locally and channel response is estimated by making use of channel statistics. Then, the interference signal is reconstructed based on the previous estimate of the channel, timing and carrier frequency offset. The interference is mitigated by subtracting the estimation of the interference signal and LLR puncturing. The block error rate (BLER) performance of the signal is notably improved by this algorithm, according to the simulation results of different channel scenarios. The proposed techniques provide low cost, low complexity solutions for LTE and beyond systems. The simulation and measurements show good overall system performance can be achieved