EN3052 Communications II

Multicarrier Communications - Tutorial

Question Consider a multicarrier modulation transmission scheme with four nonoverlapping subchannels spaced 400 KHz apart (from carrier to carrier) with subchannel baseband bandwidth of
200 KHz.
(a) For what values of the channel coherence bandwidth will the subchannels of your multicarrier scheme exhibit flat-fading (approximately no ISI)?
For what values of the channel coherence bandwidth will the subcarriers of your multicarrier scheme exhibit independent fading?
If the subcarriers exhibit correlated fading, what impact will this have on coding across
subchannels?
(b) Suppose you have a total transmit power P = 400 mW , and the noise power in each
subchannel is 1 mW. With equal power of 100 mW transmitted on each subchannel, the
received SNR on each subchannel is 1 = 10 dB, 2 = 12 dB, 3 = 15 dB, and 4 = 18 dB.
Assume the subchannels do not experience fading, so these SNRs are constant. Find
the maximum signal constellation size for MQAM that can be transmitted over each
subchannel for a target BER of 103 . Assume the MQAM constellation is restricted to
be a power of 2 and use the BER bound
BER 0.2e1.5/(M 1) ,
where is the received SNR.
What is the corresponding total data rate of the multicarrier signal, assuming a symbol
rate on each subchannel of Ts = 1/B, where B is the baseband subchannel bandwidth?
(c) For the subchannel SNRs given in part (b), suppose we want to use precoding to equalize
the received SNR in each subchannel and then send the same signal constellation over
each subchannel.
What size signal constellation is needed to achieve the same data rate as in part (b)?
What transmit power would be needed on each subchannel to achieve the required
received SNR for this constellation with a 103 BER target? How much must the total
transmit power be increased over the 400 mW transmit power in part (b)?
Solution (a)

Since the baseband bandwidth of a subchannel is 200 KHz, at the carrier frequency,
subchannels have a (bandpass) bandwidth of BN = 2 200 = 400 KHz.
For flat fading, we need coherence bandwidth Bc BN . Therefore, Bc > 10BN =
4 MHz.
For independent fading, the channel frequency response at two adjacent subcarrier
frequencies needs to be uncorrelated. That is, we require Bc < BN = 400 KHz.
If the subcarriers exhibit correlated fading, it is highly likely that the subchannels
are subject to severe fading at same time instants. When all the subchannels are in
deep fades simultaneously, burst error or contiguous errors occur in the received bit
stream. Therefore, under such a condition, coding over sub-channels will not work
since the channel codes are usually not capable of detecting and correcting burst
errors.

(b) We have
BER = 0.2e1.5(M 1)
which means that
M 1

1.5
= 1 + 0.283.
ln(5BER)

For the first sub-channel with 1 = 10 dB, this gives M 3.831, which means that
we will not be able to use any QAM modulation scheme in such a way that the target
BER is achieved. Instead of an M-QAM signal constellation, we can use BPSK.
For the second sub-channel with 1 = 12 dB, this gives M 5.4868, which means
we use 4-QAM.
For the third sub-channel with 1 = 15 dB, this gives M 9.9524, which means we
use 8-QAM.
For the third sub-channel with 1 = 18 dB, this gives M 18.8624, which means
we use 16-QAM.
Assuming no data is transmitted on the first subchannel, at each symbol interval, a total
of 9 bits are transmitted. We have Ts = 1/BN = 5 s, it means that we transmit data
at a total rate of 1.8 Mbps.
(c) Assuming no signal is transmitted in the first subchannel, to achieve the same data
rate, we will need to send 3 bits/symbol per sub-channel, that is, we will need 8-QAM
constellation (M = 8).
We have
(M 1)
=
ln(5BER).
1.5
If we need to send the 8-QAM constellation on each subchannel, a minimum SNR of
= 13.93 dB per subchannel is required.
Let Pi , PN , and i denote the transmit power of the ith subchannel, the noise power
in each subchannel, and the power gain of the ith subchannel, respectively. Then, the
SNR in the ith subchannel can be given as
i ,

Received Power
i Pi
=
,
Noise Power
PN

and for a given SNR value, the transmit power of the ith subchannel can be obtained
as follows,
i PN
.
Pi =
i
First subchannel: 1 = 0.1, Required transmit power P1 = 247.255 mW.
Second subchannel: 2 = 0.159, Required transmit power P2 = 155.997 mW.
Third subchannel: 3 = 0.316, Required transmit power P3 = 78.196 mW.
Fourth subchannel: 4 = 0.631, Required transmit power P4 = 39.185 mW.
Now the total transmit power required is PT = 520.63 mW. Therefore, we need to
increase the transmit power by 120.63 mW with respect to case b).