ICI Cancellation in OFDM Systems by Frequency Offset Reduction

Abstract

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 The orthogonality of the carriers is no longer maintained, which results in inter-carrier interference (ICI).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 complexity