ISBN 978-952-5726-06-0

Proceedings of the 2009 International Workshop on Information Security and Application (IWISA 2009)
Qingdao, China, November 21-22, 2009

Joint Filtering Scheme to Suppress the Cochannel

Interference in MIMO-OFDM Mobile
Communication
Lisheng Fan, and Yongquan Jiang
Department of Electronic Engineering, Shantou University
Email: {lsfan, jyq}@stu.edu.cn

Abstract—This paper proposes a novel joint filtering
technique in order to suppress the cochannel interference
for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal
frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation
systems. There are conventionally two techniques to
suppress cochannel interference: 1) spatio-temporal filtering
(STF) the received signals prior to the fast Fourier
transform (FFT), termed preFFT-STF; 2) the spatial
filtering (SF) the received signals posterior to FFT, termed
postFFT-SF. With limited number of preamble symbols,
preFFT-STF outperforms postFFT-SF due to the
superiority in the parameter estimation accuracy. While
with a large number of preamble symbols, preFFT-STF is
poorer than postFFT-SF because it only has limited filtering
capability. To achieve a suitable tradeoff between the
filtering capability and parameter estimation accuracy, this
paper proposes a novel joint filtering technique. The
transmitted packet is firstly divided into two parts, and then
the first part is detected by preFFT-STF while the second
part is detected by postFFT-SF. Simulation results show
that the proposed scheme outperforms significantly both the
preFFT-STF and postFFT-SF systems.
Index Terms—MIMO-OFDM, cochannel interference,
spatial filter, spatio-temproal filter
STF because the latter has fewer filter taps and cannot
suppress the cochannel interference as effectively as the
former. However, if the parameter estimation is achieved
using a limited number of preamble or pilot symbols,
then preFFT-STF will be superior to postFFT-SF.
In order to suppress the cochannel interference
effectively, this paper proposes a novel joint filtering
scheme. The transmitted packet is firstly divided into two
parts, then we employ preFFT-STF and postFFT-SF to
detect the first and second parts, respectively. The reason
for switching the detection method is that the symbols
detected by preFFT-STF can be regarded as preambles
symbols for postFFT-SF. Computer simulation results
under IEEE 802.11a demonstrate that the proposed
scheme can outperform both the preFFT-STF and
postFFT-SF systems.
II. SYSTEM MODEL
A. MIMO-OFDM multiuser uplink system
In this paper, we consider the uplink of the MIMO-
OFDM system as shown in Fig. 1. There are NU users

I. INTRODUCTION LT
sharing the same frequency band, and each user has

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna transmit antennas, whereas the receiver has an LR -
technologies and orthogonal frequency-division element array antenna. Without loss of generality, the
multiplexing (OFDM) are the two key techniques for first user is assumed to be the desired one and the other
improving the link reliability as well as the spectral users are interfering users.
efficiency of wireless communications systems [1-3]. In
B. Transmitter
MIMO-OFDM, fast Fourier transform (FFT) will be used
to extract the subcarrier components from the received Fig. 2 shows a block diagram of the MIMO-OFDM
signals for detection. However, conventional receivers transmitter. An information bit sequence is divided into
such as the maximum likelihood detector (MLD) have an
obvious bit-error-rate (BER) degradation when co-
channel interference exists.
To deal with the cochannel interference, various
approaches using spatial filtering (SF) with MLD have
been proposed to deal with cochannel interference [4-7].
This joint processing can be generally classified into two
categories: 1) postFFT-SF [4, 5], where SF is performed
after FFT operation and the filter coefficients are
computed in the frequency domain, and 2) preFFT-STF
[6, 7], in which spatio-temporal filtering (STF) is used
prior to FFT operation and the filter coefficients are Figure 1. System model
estimated in the time domain. It is known that with ideal
parameter estimation, postFFT-SF outperforms preFFT-

© 2009 ACADEMY PUBLISHER

AP-PROC-CS-09CN004 185
 Figure 2. MIMO-OFDM transmitter
LT parallel streams. Then each stream is fed into an
OFDM modulator to generate the OFDM signals that has
N subcarriers with the guard interval (GI). After the
pulse shaping, the OFDM signals are up-converted into
RF signals and transmitted. (a) preFFT-STF

C. Receiver
There are broadly two kinds of receivers to suppress
the cochannel interference: one is preFFT-STF, and the
other is postFFT-SF.
a) preFFT-STF
Fig. 3 (a) shows a block diagram of preFFT-STF with
the eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) based parameter
estimator. The signals received by LR antennas are fed
into LB branch metric generator, where generally LB is
larger than LT . The generator is mainly composed of a
(b) postFFT-SF
spatio-temporal filter and replica generators. The spatio-
temporal filter consists of LR fractional tap-spacing Figure 3. preFFT-STF and postFFT-SF
transversal filters (FTF) and an adder to combine the
FTFs' outputs. It can suppress cochannel interference and III. PROPOSED SCHEME
noise by STF. Signal components corresponding to GI are
removed from the STF outputs. FFT transforms the Although the conventional two receivers can suppress
resultant signals into N subcarrier signals. Subtracting the cochannel interference to some extent, they both have
replica signals from the subcarrier signals and squaring some limitations. The limitation of postFFT-SF is the
the result generate N subcarrier branch metrics. inaccurate parameter estimation, which appears when the
Multiplying symbol candidates that MLD provides by number of preamble symbols is limited in the cochannel
estimated channel frequency responses yields the replica interference environments. The limitation of preFFT-STF
signal. is the insufficient filtering capability due to the limited
number of temporal filter taps. To overcome these
b) postFFT-SF limitations and improve the cochannel interference
Fig. 3 (b) shows a block diagram of postFFT-SF filtering capability, this paper proposes a joint receiver, as
employing decision-directed parameter estimation. After shown in Fig. 4. The transmitted packet consists of
removing the signal components corresponding to GI several preamble symbols in the head, followed by some
from the received signals, FFT outputs the signals in the data symbols. The proposed scheme firstly divides the
subcarrier domain. Then, the subcarrier signals of the area of the data
same subcarrier frequency are passed into a respective Detected by Detected by
whitening matched filter that spatially whitens the preFFT-STF postFFT-SF
interfering signal components that are correlated, and
generates branch metrics of the transmitted symbol
candidates using channel frequency responses of the
desired signals. The branch metrics are then fed into the
MLD that outputs the detected bits.

Figure 4. Proposed scheme

symbols into two parts: the first part to be detected by

preFFT-STF and the second part to be detected by

186
postFFT-SF. Since the parameter estimation of preFFT-
STF is relatively accurate, the detection of the first part is
reliable; hence we can regard the detected data symbols
in the first part as the preamble symbols. In this way, the
length of the “preamble” symbols increases, and the
parameter estimation of postFFT-SF becomes accurate,
which can improve the filtering capability of postFFT-SF.
The parameter estimation of the proposed scheme can be
referred in [6, 7] and effect of the switch point is
discussed here.
Let I P , I D , and is denote the length of preamble
symbols, length of data symbols, and the position that the
detection method switches, respectively. We first
investigate two extreme cases: is I P and is I P  I D .
It can be easily found that the proposed scheme
(a) BER versus switch point
degenerates into postFFT-SF when is I P , while
degenerates into preFFT-STF when is I P  I D . So is
should be selected by considering the trade-off between
the effect of preFFT-STF and postFFT-SF. The BER
performance of the proposed scheme can be analyzed as

(is  I P ) u BER STF  ( I P  I D  is ) u BER SF

BER p
ID
where BER STF , BER SF , and BER p denote the BER
of preFFT-STF, postFFT-SF, the proposed scheme,
respectively. When the number of preamble symbols is
enough, BER SF is small enough and can be ignored,
then the BER of the proposed scheme is upper bounded
by
(b) BER versus the Eb/No
i I
BER p d s P BER STF
ID Figure 5. BER performance

IV. SIMULATION RESULTS
In order to demonstrate the performance of the
proposed scheme, simulations were conducted in a fading
channel under the IEEE 802.11a standard. There were
two transmit users, and each user had 2 transmit antennas.
The base station had 3 receive antennas. The FFT points
N was set to 64. The transmitted packet consists of 4
preamble symbols, followed by 10 data symbols. The
detailed simulation condition can be referred in [6, 7].
Fig. 5 shows some numerical results. In Fig. 5 (a), the
effect of the switch point on the proposed scheme is
shown. For comparison, the results of preFFT-STF and
postFFT-SF are also demonstrated. It can be found that
the proposed scheme converges into preFFT-STF when
is I P , and into postFFT-SF when is I P  I D . To
achieve a suitable tradeoff, the switch position is set to 7.
Fig. 5 (b) shows the BER performance of the three
schemes versus the average Eb/No. It can be seen that in
the high Eb/No region, the proposed scheme outperforms
both preFFT-STF and postFFT-SF, which demonstrates
the validity of the proposed scheme.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported by Guangdong Provincial
Natural Science Foundation of China (No.
9451503101003262).
REFERENCES
[1] H. Sampath, S. Talwar, J. Tellado, V. Erceg, and A.
Paulraj, “A fourth-generation MIMO-OFDM broadband
wireless system: Design, performance, and field trial
results,” IEEE Commun. Mag., vol. 40, no.9, pp. 143-149,
Sept. 2002.
[2] A. van Zelst, and T. C. W. Schenk, “Implementation of a
MIMO OFDM-based wireless LAN system,” IEEE Trans.
Sig. Proc., vol. 52, no. 2, pp. 483-494, Feb. 2004.

187
[3] H. Sampath, V. Erceg, and A. Paulraj, “Performance
analysis of linear precoding based on field trials results of
MIMO-OFDM system,” IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun.,
vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 404-409, Mar. 2005.
[4] S. Suthaharan, A. Nallanathan, and B. Kannan, “Space-
time coded MIMO-OFDM for high capacity and high
data-rate wireless communication over frequency
selective fading channels,” in Proc. Int. Workshop Mobile
and Wireless Commun. Net., pp. 424-428, 9-11 Sept. 2002.
[5] Y.P. Seung, and G.K. Chung, “Complexity-reduced
iterative MAP receiver for interference suppression in
OFDM-based spatial multiplexing systems,” IEEE Trans.
188
Veh. Tech., vol. 53, no. 5, pp. 1316-1326, Sept. 2004.
[6] K. Fukawa, Y. Yamada, H. Suzuki, and S. Suyama, “A
MIMO-OFDM maximum likelihood reception scheme in
cochannel interference environments,” in Proc. IEEE Veh.
Tech. Conf. Spring, pp. 1849-1853, 17-19 May 2004,
Milan, Italy.
[7] F. Lisheng, K. Fukawa, H. Suzuki, and S. Suyama,
“MIMO-OFDM MAP receiver with spatial-temporal
filters employing decision-directed recursive eigenvalue
decomposition parameter estimation,” IEICE Trans.
Commun., vol. E91-B, no. 4, pp. 1112-1121, Apr. 2008.