Lecture 18 - EE 359: Wireless Communications - Fall 2011

Fading Across Subcarriers in Multicarrier OFDM Implementation and Design

Lecture Outline
Fading across subcarriers in multicarrier modulation FFT Implementation of OFDM OFDM Design Issues OFDM-MIMO Systems

1. Fading Across Subcarriers in Multicarrier Modulation Frequency-selective fading leads to dierent gains (and BERs) on dierent carrier streams. Can compensate using a frequency-domain equalizer, but leads to noise enhancement. Precoding compensates for FS fading by inverting subcarrier fading at transmitter. Basically channel inversion: power inecient. Also requires channel knowledge at transmitter. Coding across subchannels sends each bit of a codeword on a dierent subcarrier. Takes advantage of frequency diversity. Adaptive loading adapts power and rate on subcarriers relative to their gain. Optimization similar to that of adaptive modulation in time. 2. FFT Implementation of OFDM Complexity of implementing N separate modulators/demodulators is prohibitive. MCM eectively implemented using IFFT at transmitter and FFT at receiver. The IFFT shifts modulated symbols to desired subcarriers. A cyclic prex is inserted in the data to remove ISI between blocks and make the linear convolution with the channel circular. The received symbol is just a scaled version of the transmitted symbol. 3. Challenges in OFDM OFDM/DMT consists of multiple sinusoids summed together, can have a large peakto-average power ratio (PAR), which leads to amplier ineciencies. PAR compensated through clipping or coding. Timing and frequency osets cause subchannels to interfere with each other. Interference between subchannels mitigated by minimizing the number of subchannels and using pulse shapes robust to timing errors. 4. MIMO-OFDM Systems Most next-generation wireless systems combine OFDM and MIMO, e.g. 4G cellular, Wimax, next-generation Wi (802.11n) and future generations.

 These systems use OFDM modulation over each spatial dimension OFDM compensates for ISI, while MIMO is used for its diversity/multiplexing benets. MIMO-OFDM systems adapt over space, time, and frequency. Receiver complexity depends on both the MIMO parameters and the number of OFDM tones: high data rates lead to more tones to compensate for ISI, hence more complexity.

Main Points
Fading Across subchannels compensated by adaptive loading, precoding, or coding across subchannels. OFDM ecienctly implemented using FFTs and IFFTs. Challenges in OFDM include PAR and timing/frequency osets. 4G Cellular, Wimax, 802.11n all use OFDM+MIMO: OFDM removes ISI, MIMO gives diversity/multiplexing benets. These systems adapt across space, time, and frequency