Performance of a Software Defined Radio based Non-Coherent OFDM Wireless Link

With improved technological successions, wireless communication applications have been incessantly evolving. Owing to the challenges posed by the multipath wireless channel, radio design prototypes have become elemental in all wireless systems before deployment. Further, different signal processing requirements of the applications, demand a highly versatile and reconfigurable radio such as Software Defined Radio (SDR) as a crucial device in the design phase. In this paper, two such SDR modules are used to develop an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) wireless link, the technology triumphant ever since 4G. In particular, a non-coherent end-to-end OFDM wireless link is developed in the Ultra High Frequency (UHF) band at a carrier frequency of 470 MHz. The transmitter includes Barker sequences as frame headers and pilot symbols for channel estimation. At the receiver, pulse alignment using Max energy method, frame synchronization using sliding correlator approach and carrier offset correction using Moose algorithm are incorporated. In addition, wireless channel is estimated using Least Square (LS) based pilot aided channel estimation approach with denoising threshold and link performance is analyzed using average Bit Error Rate (BER), in different pilot symbol scenarios. In a typical laboratory environment, the results of BER versus receiver gain show that with 4 pilot symbols out of 128 carriers, at a gain of 20 dB, BER is 0.160922, which is reduced to 0.136884 with 16 pilot symbols. The developed link helps OFDM researchers to mitigate different challenges posed by the wireless environment and thereby strengthen OFDM technology

Performance of a Software Defined Radio based Non-Coherent OFDM Wireless Link

With improved technological successions, wireless communication applications have been incessantly evolving. Owing to the challenges posed by the multipath wireless channel, radio design prototypes have become elemental in all wireless systems before deployment. Further, different signal processing requirements of the applications, demand a highly versatile and reconfigurable radio such as Software Defined Radio (SDR) as a crucial device in the design phase. In this paper, two such SDR modules are used to develop an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) wireless link, the technology triumphant ever since 4G. In particular, a non-coherent end-to-end OFDM wireless link is developed in the Ultra High Frequency (UHF) band at a carrier frequency of 470 MHz. The transmitter includes Barker sequences as frame headers and pilot symbols for channel estimation. At the receiver, pulse alignment using Max energy method, frame synchronization using sliding correlator approach and carrier offset correction using Moose algorithm are incorporated. In addition, wireless channel is estimated using Least Square (LS) based pilot aided channel estimation approach with denoising threshold and link performance is analyzed using average Bit Error Rate (BER), in different pilot symbol scenarios. In a typical laboratory environment, the results of BER versus receiver gain show that with 4 pilot symbols out of 128 carriers, at a gain of 20 dB, BER is 0.160922, which is reduced to 0.136884 with 16 pilot symbols. The developed link helps OFDM researchers to mitigate different challenges posed by the wireless environment and thereby strengthen OFDM technology

On the Comparison of Various Overhead Arrangements for Massive MIMO-OFDM Channel Estimation

Massive multi input multi output (MIMO) systems incorporate orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technology to render high data rate services for future wireless communication applications. The channel estimator (CE) employed by a reliable massive MIMO-OFDM system requires huge amount of overhead in the form of known and null data transmissions, hence limiting the system spectral efficiency (SE). Often, CE design is a tradeoff between SE and system reliability. In this paper, CE with three different overhead arrangements, namely time domain synchronous (TDS), comb type with cyclic prefix (CTCP), $2D$ grid type with cyclic prefix (GTCP) are investigated and a GTCP based CE is proposed which offers both high SE and improved system reliability. The proposed CE uses autocorrelation based denoising threshold for channel impulse response (CIR) estimation and does not require any knowledge of channel statistics (KCS). A $4 \times 16$ MIMO-OFDM system is simulated in a rayleigh fading channel environment with U-shaped doppler spectrum. From the bit error rate (BER) performance results in WiMax SUI-$4$, Advanced Television Technology Center (ATTC) and Brazil A channel environments, it is verified that the proposed CE with GTCP overhead and proposed denoising scheme, indeed improves both SE and system reliability. Hence it is suitable for application in all massive MIMO-OFDM systems

Performance of a Software Defined Radio based Non-Coherent OFDM Wireless Link

With improved technological successions, wireless communication applications have been incessantly evolving. Owing to the challenges posed by the multipath wireless channel, radio design prototypes have become elemental in all wireless systems before deployment. Further, different signal processing requirements of the applications, demand a highly versatile and reconfigurable radio such as Software Defined Radio (SDR) as a crucial device in the design phase. In this paper, two such SDR modules are used to develop an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) wireless link, the technology triumphant ever since 4G. In particular, a non-coherent end-to-end OFDM wireless link is developed in the Ultra High Frequency (UHF) band at a carrier frequency of 470 MHz. The transmitter includes Barker sequences as frame headers and pilot symbols for channel estimation. At the receiver, pulse alignment using Max energy method, frame synchronization using sliding correlator approach and carrier offset correction using Moose algorithm are incorporated. In addition, wireless channel is estimated using Least Square (LS) based pilot aided channel estimation approach with denoising threshold and link performance is analyzed using average Bit Error Rate (BER), in different pilot symbol scenarios. In a typical laboratory environment, the results of BER versus receiver gain show that with 4 pilot symbols out of 128 carriers, at a gain of 20 dB, BER is 0.160922, which is reduced to 0.136884 with 16 pilot symbols. The developed link helps OFDM researchers to mitigate different challenges posed by the wireless environment and thereby strengthen OFDM technology

A survey on OFDM channel estimation techniques based on denoising strategies

Channel estimation forms the heart of any orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based wireless communication receiver. Frequency domain pilot aided channel estimation techniques are either least squares (LS) based or minimum mean square error (MMSE) based. LS based techniques are computationally less complex. Unlike MMSE ones, they do not require a priori knowledge of channel statistics (KCS). However, the mean square error (MSE) performance of the channel estimator incorporating MMSE based techniques is better compared to that obtained with the incorporation of LS based techniques. To enhance the MSE performance using LS based techniques, a variety of denoising strategies have been developed in the literature, which are applied on the LS estimated channel impulse response (CIR). The advantage of denoising threshold based LS techniques is that, they do not require KCS but still render near optimal MMSE performance similar to MMSE based techniques. In this paper, a detailed survey on various existing denoising strategies, with a comparative discussion of these strategies is presented