Reference:

3GPP LONG TERM EVOLUTION (LTE) CHANNEL PARAMETERRS

ESTIMATION AND TRACKING, master thesis, appendices A, Abdo Nasser Ali Gaber


A. Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) Systems
In high data rate, wideband communication through multipath fading channel, the received
signals are affected by ISI due to the fact that the time spread of the channel is relatively large
compared to the symbol duration. Reducing ISI is an important target for enhancing the
quality of wideband communications which can be done by implement channel complex
equalization.
Multicarrier modulation offers another approach, a serial high data rate stream is distributed
into many parallel low data rate streams, transmitted through many orthogonal narrowband
subcarriers. Thus, the symbol duration in each channel is large enough to get negligible ISI
and the frequency response on each sub-channel can then be considered flat which greatly
simplifies equalizer design.
A.1 Fundamental Concepts of OFDM
Transmission by means of OFDM can be seen as a kind of multi-carrier transmission. The
basic principle of OFDM is to split the data into multiple parallel streams and employ
orthogonal sub-carriers to each of these streams. The sub-carriers are allowed to overlap, but
they are still mathematically orthogonal to each other (Proakis, 2001). This increases the
OFDM spectral efficiency compared to a conventional multi-carrier system. OFDM
transmission is distinguished from a straightforward multi-carrier transmission by
It uses a relatively large number of narrowband subcarriers. In contrast, a straightforward
multi-carrier consists of only a few subcarriers (each with a relatively wide bandwidth), as
shown figure (A.1, a and b).
A subcarrier spacing 1/
u
f T = , where
u
T is the per-subcarrier modulation symbol time.
The subcarrier spacing is thus equal to the per-subcarrier modulation rate, 1/
u
T .
It uses simple rectangular pulse shaping as illustrated in figure (A.2, a). This corresponds
to a sinc-square-shaped per-subcarrier spectrum, as illustrated in figure (A.2, b).
Figure A.1: OFDM spectrum consists of overlapping sinc functions and Multi carrier
spectrum separated by guard bands.
Figure A.2: Per-subcarrier spectrum and pulse shape for basic OFDM transmission.
A basic OFDM signal ( ) x t during the time interval
u
mT t <( 1)
u
m T + can be represented in
baseband notation as (Dahlman, et al., 2007)
1 1
2
,
0 0
( ) ( )
u u
N N
j k ft
k m k
k k
x t x t a e



= =
= =

(A.1)
-1 -0.8 -0.6 -0.4 -0.2 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
x 10
5
0
0.5
1
(a) OFDM spectrum (freq. spacing=15KHz)
-1 -0.8 -0.6 -0.4 -0.2 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
x 10
5
0
0.5
1
(b) Multicarrier spectrum (freq. spacing=4*15KHz)
-1 -0.5 0 0.5 1
x 10
5
0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1
(a) Frequency domain
(sin(pi*f/df)/(pi*f/df))
2
df=15KHz
0 2 4 6
x 10
-5
0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1
(b) Time domain
Pulse shape
Tu=1/15KHz
where ( )
k
x t is the
th
k modulated subcarrier with frequency
k
f k f = ,
, m k
a is the modulation
symbol applied to the
th
k subcarrier during the
th
m OFDM symbol interval,
u
mT t <( 1)
u
m T + ,
which is in general complex, and
u
N is the number of useful subcarriers.
There are
u
N modulation symbols are transmitted in parallel during each OFDM symbol
interval. In LTE, the modulation symbols can be from any modulation alphabet, such as
QPSK, 16QAM, or 64QAM.
Orthogonality of OFDM comes from the quality between the subcarrier spacing and the per-
subcarrier symbol rate, 1/
u
f T = . For example, the two modulated OFDM subcarriers
1
( )
k
x t
and
2
( )
k
x t are mutually orthogonal over the time interval
u
mT t <( 1)
u
m T + as follows.
1 2 1 2
( 1) ( 1) ( 1)
2 2 2 ( ) * * *
1 2 , 1 , 2 , 1 , 2
( ) ( )
u u u
u u u
m T m T m T
j k ft j k ft j k k ft
k k m k m k m k m k
mT mT mT
x t x t dt a a e e dt a a e dt

+ + +

= =

(A.2)
1 2
If k k , eq. (A.2) becomes

1 2 1 2
1 2 1 2
2 ( ) ( 1) 2 ( ) *
, 1 , 2
1 2
2 ( )( 1) 2 ( ) *
, 1 , 2
1 2
1
2 ( )
1
0
2 ( )
u u
j k k f m T j k k fmT
m k m k
j k k m j k k m
m k m k
a a e e
j k k f
a a e e
j k k f

+
+
=


= =


(A.3)
From the above, each subcarrier has exactly an integer number of cycles in the time interval (
u
T ). This property accounts for the orthogonality between the subcarriers (Yongwan, et al.,
2007), as shown in figure (A.3).


Figure A.3: OFDM signal in time domain with 4 subcarriers.

The sampling rate,
s
f , is a multiple of the subcarrier spacing like
1/ 1/
s s u
f T N f N T = = = . The parameter N should be chosen so that the sampling
theorem is satisfied (Proakis, 2001). If
u
N f can be seen as the nominal bandwidth of the
OFDM signal, N should exceed
u
N with a sufficient margin. Thus, the time discrete OFDM
signal can be expressed as
1
2 2 / ' 2 /
0 0 0
( ) ( )
u u
s
N N N
j k fnT j kn N j kn N
s k k k
k k k
x n x nT a e a e a e

= = =
= = = =

(A.4)
where
'
;0 1
0; 1
k u
k
u
a k N
a
N k N

=

The ratio /
u
N N is a non-integer number and could be seen as the over-sampling of the time
discrete OFDM signal. Equation (A.4) is identical to the expression of N point IDFT. Hence,
the sub-carrier multiplexing can be efficiently performed with the help of implementation
efficient radix-2 IFFT processing. This gives a remarkable computational advantage with FFT
which has complexity of order
2
( log ) O N N instead of the
2
( ) O N (Oppenheim, 1999). This
is one of the most attractive features of OFDM, since the transmitter can multiplex data
symbols into sub-carriers by employing the computationally efficient IFFT operation. The
frequency division multiplexing can also be achieved by baseband processing rather than
0 1 2 3 4 5 6
x 10
-5
-1
-0.5
0
0.5
1
time t=[0 1/15kHz]
A
m
p
l
i
t
u
d
e
OFDM signal with 4 subcarriers
band-pass filtering. Obviously, an OFDM receiver can perform the demodulation with a
simple FFT operation. As an example, the number of subcarriers
u
N in 3GPP LTE is 600 in
case of a 10MHz spectrum allocation. The IFFT size can then be selected as 1024 N = . This
corresponds to a sampling rate 15.36
s
f N f MHz = = ( see table (4)).
A.2 Cyclic Prefix in OFDM
The basic principle of OFDM involves splitting a high data rate stream into
u
N streams of
lower data rate streams that are transmitted simultaneously over the same number of sub-
carriers. The lower data rate streams have
u
N times the symbol duration compared to the
original data stream. This reduces the ratio of the relative delay spread to the symbol duration
by the same factor and reduces the multipath dispersion in an OFDM system. The ISI can be
completely eliminated by introducing a guard time longer than the delay spread by copying
the last
cp
N samples and inserting at the beginning of each OFDM symbol, as shown in figure
(A.4).
cyclic prefix

time

cp
T
u
T

symbol cp u
T T T = + ,
total cp
N N N = +

Figure A.4: OFDM symbol.
The samples of the transmitted baseband OFDM signal can then be expressed as
2 /
0
( ) 1/
u
N
j kn N
k
k
x n N a e

=
=

1
cp
N n N (A.5)
where
cp
N is the number of cyclic prefix samples which copied to the beginning of OFDM
symbol.
From the above, the basic transmission parameters of OFDM are:
1. The subcarrier spacing, f .
2. Number of occupied subcarriers,
u
N , which together with the subcarrier spacing
determine the overall transmission bandwidth of the OFDM signal.
3. Number of IFFT points, N .
4. Sampling frequency
s FFT
f f N = .
5. The cyclic prefix time,
cp
T , together with the useful symbol time, 1/
u
T f = , determine
the overall OFDM symbol time interval
symbol u CP
T T T = + or, equivalently, the OFDM
symbol rate. The degradation in data rate due to the cyclic prefix is given by /( )
cp
N N N + .
A.3 Guard Interval around OFDM spectrum
The spectrum of a basic OFDM signal falls off very slowly outside the basic OFDM
bandwidth and especially much slower than for a W-CDMA signal, as shown in figure (A.5).
The reason for the large out-of-band emission of a basic OFDM signal is the use of
rectangular pulse shaping which leads to per-subcarrier side lobes that fall off relatively
slowly. In practice, straightforward filtering or time-domain windowing is used to suppress a
main part of the OFDM out-of-band emissions (Nee, et al., 2000). In 3GPP LTE, a 10% guard
band is needed for an OFDM signal. As an example, if a spectrum allocation is 5 MHz, the
basic OFDM bandwidth
u
N f could be in the order of 4.5 MHz (5 MHz-10%5 MHz),
which means
u
N should be 300 subcarriers.

Figure A.5: Spectrum of a basic 5 MHz OFDM signal compared with W-CDMA spectrum
(adapted by Dahlman, et al., 2007).