34
1, JANUARY 2012
ML Detection with Successive Group Interference Cancellation for
Interleaved OFDMA Uplink
Weikun Hou, Xianbin Wang, Senior Member, IEEE, and Gejie Liu, Student Member, IEEE
Abstract—To mitigate the interference caused by multiple
carrier frequency offsets (CFO) of distributed users, a maximum
likelihood (ML) detection with group-wise successive interference
cancellation (GSIC) is proposed for interleaved Orthogonal
Frequency Division Multiplexing Access (OFDMA) uplink. By
exploiting the interference characteristics and the finite alphabet
property of transmitted symbols, the proposed scheme first
extracts the block diagonal of the frequency domain channel
matrix and then employs ML detection via sphere decoding in
each block. The decisions obtained from the detected blocks are
used to mitigate the interference to the residual blocks. Numerical
results show that the proposed scheme outperforms both the
minimum mean square error (MMSE) detection and parallel
interference cancellation (PIC) with affordable computational
complexity.
Index Terms—Carrier frequency offset (CFO), sphere decod-
ing, intercarrier interference (ICI), OFDMA.
I. I NTRODUCTION
I N the uplink of OFDMA, multiple independent carrier
frequency offsets (CFO) from distinctive users caused by
oscillator mismatches and Doppler shifts result in the loss of
subcarrier orthogonality [1]. Consequently, intercarrier inter-
ference (ICI) and multiple access interference (MAI) arise and
significantly degrade the system performance. The impact of
MAI is even worse for interleaved carrier assignment scheme
(CAS) that aims to maximize the frequency diversity [1], since
adjacent subcarriers are occupied by different users in such
assignment scheme.
To mitigate CFO-induced interferences, a frequency syn-
chronization scheme based on the approximate band structure
of the frequency domain channel matrix was proposed in
[2], while its performance is inferior to the minimum mean
square error (MMSE) detection. In [3], the space-alternating
generalized expectation-maximization (SAGE) algorithm was
explored to remove the interference for interleaved CAS within
a limited CFO range. Multiuser detection techniques such as
selective interference cancellation [4] and parallel interference
cancellation (PIC) [5] were developed for symbol detection in
the OFDMA uplink. However, error propagation degrades the
performance and causes error floor in the high signal-to-noise
ratio (SNR) region.
Due to the symbol energy dispersion across subcarriers
caused by CFOs, interference cancellation can be recast as
a multiple input multiple output (MIMO) detection problem,
where the optimal maximum likelihood detection (MLD) of
Manuscript received June 6, 2011. The associate editor coordinating the
review of this letter and approving it for publication was T. Ait-Idir.
The authors are with the University of Western Ontario, London, ON,
N6G5B9 Canada (e-mail: {whou5, xianbin.wang, gliu63}@uwo.ca).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LCOMM.2011.110711.111195
1089-7798/12$31.00 ⃝
IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 16, NO.
finite alphabet symbols can be achieved by sphere decoding
efficiently [6]. To the best of our knowledge, sphere decoding
has not been investigated for interference cancellation in the
OFDMA uplink. Inspired by this finding, a subblock based
MLD with group-wise successive interference cancellation
(GSIC) is proposed to mitigate MAI and ICI. As the impact of
interferences mainly comes from neighboring subcarriers [5],
the frequency domain channel matrix is divided into several
subblocks along the main diagonal, and MLD is applied to
each block via sphere decoding successively. The superior per-
formance provided by MLD can reduce the error propagation
in the subsequent interference cancellation. With the tentative
decisions for detected subblocks, the interference to the unde-
tected blocks are eliminated in the following demodulations.
The above procedure can be applied iteratively to further
improve the performance. Simulation results demonstrate the
effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
II. I NTERLEAVED OFDMA S YSTEM M ODEL
In interleaved OFDMA uplink with 𝑁 data subcarriers and
𝑀 users, the subcarriers with equidistant spacing are allocated
for each user. Therefore, the symbols 𝑋𝑚 (𝑘) of the 𝑚th user
are allocated to subcarriers with index set 𝒮𝑚 = {𝑝𝑀 +𝑚, 0 ≤
𝑝 ≤ 𝑁/𝑀 −1}. The corresponding transmitted signal with the
cyclic prefix (CP) of length 𝐺 can be expressed as
1 ∑ 2𝜋𝑘
𝑠𝑚 (𝑛) = √ 𝑋𝑚 (𝑘) 𝑒𝑗 𝑁 𝑛 , −𝐺 ≤ 𝑛 ≤ 𝑁 − 1. (1)
𝑁 𝑘∈𝒮𝑚
Assuming each user is time synchronized and the initial
phase offset has been incorporated into the channel impulse
response, the received baseband signal from multiple users
with different CFOs {𝜖𝑚 , 0 ≤ 𝑚 ≤ 𝑀 − 1} is given by
𝑀−1
∑ 2𝜋𝜖𝑚
𝐿−1
∑
𝑟(𝑛) = 𝑒𝑗 𝑁 𝑛
ℎ𝑚 (𝑑) 𝑠𝑚 (𝑛 − 𝑑) + 𝑤(𝑛),
𝑚=0 𝑑=0
0 ≤ 𝑛 ≤ 𝑁 − 1, (2)
where ℎ𝑚 (𝑑) is the channel impulse response experienced by
the transmitted signal of the 𝑚th user such that the maximum
length 𝐿 is shorter than the length of CP (i.e. 𝐿 < 𝐺), and
𝑤(𝑛) is the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) with zero
mean and variance 𝜎02 .
Without loss of generality, suppose that the 𝑘th subcarrier
is allocated to the 𝑢th user (i.e. 𝑘 ∈ 𝒮𝑢 ). The corresponding
signal after the discrete fourier transform (DFT) of 𝑟(𝑛) is
obtained as [4]
𝑀−1
∑ ∑
𝑌 (𝑘) = 𝐻𝑚 (𝑙)𝐼𝜖𝑚 (𝑘, 𝑙)𝑋𝑚 (𝑙) + 𝑊 (𝑘)
𝑚=0 𝑙∈𝒮𝑚
= 𝐻𝑢 (𝑘)𝐼𝜖𝑢 (𝑘, 𝑘)𝑋𝑢 (𝑘) + 𝐼ICI (𝑘) + 𝐼MAI (𝑘) + 𝑊 (𝑘), (3)
c 2012 IEEE
HOU et al.: ML DETECTION WITH SUCCESSIVE GROUP INTERFERENCE CANCELLATION FOR INTERLEAVED OFDMA UPLINK 35

∑𝐿−1 − 𝑗2𝜋𝑙
where 𝐻𝑚 (𝑙) = 𝑁 𝑑 is the channel fre-
𝑑=0 ℎ𝑚 (𝑑)𝑒 complexity, the MLD can be applied within these subblocks by
quency response of the 𝑚th user over the 𝑙th subcarrier, discarding the small interference from off-diagonal subblocks
𝐼𝜖𝑚 (𝑘, 𝑙) = 𝑁sin 𝜋(𝑘−𝑙+𝜖𝑚 ) 1
−𝑗(1− 𝑁 )𝜋(𝑘−𝑙+𝜖𝑚 )
𝜋
sin 𝑁 (𝑘−𝑙+𝜖𝑚 ) 𝑒 is the inter-
x̂𝑞 = arg min {∥y𝑞 − H𝑞𝑞 x𝑞 ∥2 }, 1 ≤ 𝑞 ≤ 𝑄, (9)
ference factor from the 𝑙th subcarrier to the 𝑘th subcarrier x𝑞 ∈𝒜𝑃
caused by the 𝑚th user’s CFO, and 𝑊 (𝑘) is the trans-
where x𝑞 , y𝑞 are the truncated transmitted and received signal
formed noise at the DFT demodulator output. 𝐼ICI (𝑘) =
∑ vectors corresponding to the (𝑞, 𝑞)th subblock H𝑞𝑞 .
𝐻𝑢 (𝑘)𝐼𝜖𝑢 (𝑘, 𝑙)𝑋𝑢 (𝑙) is the ICI and 𝐼MAI (𝑘) =
∑𝑙∈𝒮
𝑀−1
𝑢 ,𝑙∕=𝑘
∑ An efficient method to achieve the MLD in (9) is sphere
𝑚=0,𝑚∕=𝑢 𝑙∈𝒮𝑚 𝐻𝑚 (𝑙)𝐼𝜖𝑚 (𝑘, 𝑙)𝑋𝑚 (𝑙) is the MAI over decoding [6]. It can reduce the detection complexity by search-
the 𝑘th subcarrier. ing the minimum cost symbol vector in the 𝑃 dimensional
Denote y = [𝑌 (0), 𝑌 (1), ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ , 𝑌 (𝑁 − 1)]𝑇 and w = alphabet set 𝒜𝑃 based on a predefined hypersphere radius.
[𝑊 (0), 𝑊 (1), ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ , 𝑊 (𝑁 − 1)]𝑇 . The symbols from each sub- The initial radius 𝜌𝑞 of each subblock is given by
carrier can be formed as a vector x = [𝑋(0), ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ , 𝑋(𝑁 −1)]𝑇 .
Equation (3) can then be expressed in matrix form as 𝜌𝑞 = ∥y𝑞 − H𝑞𝑞 x̂0𝑞 ∥, 1 ≤ 𝑞 ≤ 𝑄, (10)

y = Hx + w, (4) where x̂0𝑞

where the (𝑘, 𝑙)th element of the frequency domain
∑𝑀−1 matrix H is expressed as 𝐻(𝑘, 𝑙)
channel = Once the radius is determined, the QR decomposition on
𝑚=0 𝜑𝑚 (𝑙)𝐻𝑚 (𝑘)𝐼𝜖𝑚 (𝑘, 𝑙). 𝜑𝑚 (⋅) is the indicator
function, if the carrier is allocated to the 𝑚th user (i.e.
𝑙 ∈ 𝒮𝑚 ), then 𝜑𝑚 (𝑙) = 1; otherwise 𝜑𝑚 (𝑙) = 0. In the
following, H is assumed perfectly known at the receiver.
III. P ROPOSED S UBBLOCK BASED MLD WITH GSIC
A. MLD for each subblock
The optimal MLD for the 𝑁 data subcarriers can be
formulated as
x̂mld = arg min {∥y − Hx∥2 },
x∈𝒜𝑁
where 𝒜 is the discrete alphabet with size 𝐾 = ∣𝒜∣. Due
to the large number of subcarriers in OFDMA system (e.g.,
𝑁 = 256 or 512), the MLD in (5) demands unsustainable
brute force search with computational complexity 𝑂(𝐾 𝑁 ).
An alternative to the MLD is the linear MMSE detection
regardless of the symbol vector constraint (i.e. x ∈ 𝒜𝑁 ) [2]
x̂mmse = (H𝐻 H + 𝜎02 IN )−1 H𝐻 y,
where IN is the identity matrix of size 𝑁 and (⋅)𝐻 denotes the
Hermitian transpose of the matrix. However, it is suboptimal
and still involves 𝑂(𝑁 3 ) large computational complexity [2].
Partition H into square subblocks with size 𝑃 as below
⎡ ⎤
H11 H12 . . . H1𝑄
⎢ H21 H22 . . . H2𝑄 ⎥
⎢ ⎥
H=⎢ . .. .. .. ⎥ , (7)
⎣ .. . . . ⎦
H𝑄1 H𝑄2 . . . H𝑄𝑄
where 𝑄 satisfies that 𝑄 × 𝑃 = 𝑁 . Bearing in mind that most
interferences come from adjacent subcarriers [2], we extract
the subblocks from the main block diagonal of H. Hence, H
can be decomposed as
H = Hdiag + Hoff ,
where Hdiag is the block diagonal matrix defined as Hdiag =
diag{H11 , H22 , ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ , H𝑄𝑄 } and Hoff is the complement ma-
trix consisting of the rest off-diagonal subblocks.
As the main diagonal subblocks (i.e. H𝑞𝑞 , 1 ≤ 𝑞 ≤ 𝑄)
contain interference factors of neighboring subcarriers, they
correspond to the main source of interference. To reduce
is the tentative decisions from conventional one-
ˆ
tap detection (i.e. 𝑋(𝑘) = 𝑌 (𝑘)/𝐻(𝑘, 𝑘)) or subblock based
MMSE detection (i.e. x̂0𝑞 = (H𝐻 2 −1 𝐻
𝑞𝑞 H𝑞𝑞 + 𝜎0 IP ) H𝑞𝑞 y𝑞 ).
the subblock matrix H𝑞𝑞 can be applied [7] and tree search
is used to find the MLD solution. The details of the above
sphere decoding procedure can be found in [6][7].
B. Subblock based MLD with GSIC
In this section, the proposed algorithm is provided by
combining the subblock based MLD and GSIC. The reliable
decisions obtained by the MLD can significantly reduce the
error propagation in the subsequent GSIC stage.
(5) The algorithm extracts the small size subblocks H𝑞𝑞 (1 ≤
𝑞 ≤ 𝑄) from the block diagonal of the full channel matrix
H. After the detection of subcarriers in the 𝑞th subblock, the
corresponding interferences are subtracted from the received
signal to improve the following detections. The procedure
continues until all the subcarriers are demodulated. For clarity,
the proposed algorithm is summarized in the following.
1) Initialization: Obtain the initial decisions x̂0 using the
conventional one tap equalization and the residual signal
(6)
is yrsd = y − H x̂0 .
2) Apply MLD for the 𝑞th subblock via sphere de-
coding: Extract the 𝑞th main diagonal subblock H𝑞𝑞
from full channel matrix H and apply MLD within this
subblock. The search radius for sphere decoding is set
to 𝜌𝑞 = ∥y𝑞rsd ∥ = ∥y𝑞 − H𝑞𝑞 x̂0𝑞 ∥, such that at least
one solution (i.e. x̂0𝑞 ) is included in the search. Then
sphere decoding is used to search the ML symbol vector
solution [6][7].
3) GSIC: Once the 𝑞th subblock is detected, the cor-
responding decisions are used to update the residual
signal as yrsd ← yrsd − H̃𝑞 (x̂1𝑞 − x̂0𝑞 ), where H̃𝑞 =
[H𝑇1𝑞 , H𝑇2𝑞 , ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ , H𝑇𝑞𝑞 , ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ , H𝑇𝑄𝑞 ]𝑇 is the 𝑁 × 𝑃 matrix
extracted from H.
4) Loop: Step 2 and 3 are repeated from 𝑞 = 1 to 𝑄 until
(8) all the subblocks are detected. Further iteration can be
performed to enhance the detection performance.
C. Computational complexity analysis
Using sphere decoding to achieve subblock based MLD
with size 𝑃 , the QR decomposition requires 𝑂(𝑃 3 ) com-
putations and the corresponding tree search requires 𝑂(𝑃 2 )
36
0 0
10
−1
10
Symbol error rate
−2
10
One tap equalizer
MMSE
PIC [5] (2 iterations)
Proposed (subblock size=5)
Proposed (1 iteration)
−3
10
0 5 10 15
SNR (dB)
Fig. 1. The comparison of symbol error rate (SER) vs. SNR performance.
TABLE I
C OMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY COMPARISON
Detector Proposed MMSE
CMs 2.38 × 105 5.04 × 107
computations per candidate vector. When the size of the
modulation alphabet is 𝐾, the average decoding is at ex-
ponential complexity 𝑂(𝑃 2 𝐾 𝛾𝑃 ) (𝛾 is a constant satisfying
that 0 < 𝛾 < 1) [7]. For the GSIC operations, 𝑁 2 complex
multiplications (CM) are needed. Therefore the total compu-
tational complexity with 𝑄 subblocks is 𝑂(𝑁 𝑃 𝐾 𝛾𝑃 + 𝑁 2 ).
Because the subblock size 𝑃 is small and independent of 𝑁 ,
the complexity is comparable to the PIC scheme [5] with
𝑂(2𝑁 2 ), and significantly less than the MMSE detection of
(6) with 𝑂(𝑁 3 ).
Table I shows the required CMs of different schemes.
𝑁 = 256 subcarriers, 𝑀 = 8 users and QPSK modulation are
used and one iteration is employed. The subblock size 𝑃 is 5
and 𝛾 is set to 1/2 for the average sphere decoding complexity.
Matrix inversion requires 𝑁 3 CMs in this evaluation. The
complexity of the proposed scheme is 21% higher than the
PIC scheme but significantly less than the MMSE detection.
IV. S IMULATION R ESULTS
A 256 FFT sized OFDMA system with CP length 𝐺 = 32
and QPSK modulation is considered. Guard bands with 8
subcarriers are used at both ends of the spectrum, which leads
to 240 data subcarriers in total. There are 8 users in the system
and each is allocated with 30 subcarriers with equidistant
spacing of 8 subcarrier. The transmitted signal of each user
experiences independent Stanford University Interim-3 (SUI-
3) multipath channel respectively. The CFOs are generated
independently for each user within the subcarrier spacing
normalized range [−0.5, 0.5].
Fig.1 illustrates the symbol error rate (SER) vs. SNR
performance. The PIC (with 2 iterations), MMSE and one-tap
detection schemes are also shown for comparison. It shows
that the proposed scheme with one iteration (subblock size =
5) is the best among the all (about 4dB better than MMSE at
SER = 10−2 ). Without any iteration, the proposed scheme is
IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 16, NO. 1, JANUARY 2012
10
−1
10
Symbol error rate
Subblock size P=3
−2
10 Subblock size P=3 (1 iteration)
Subblock size P=5
Subblock size P=5 (1 iteration)
Subblock size P=8
Subblock size P=8 (1 iteration)
MMSE
−3
10
20 25 30 0 5 10 15 20 25 30
SNR (dB)
Fig. 2. SER performance with different subblock sizes for sphere decoding.
still better than the MMSE detections when SNR < 23dB, but
PIC encounters error floor in higher SNR.
1.97 × 105 Fig.2 shows that SER improves as the size of the subblock
increases, which indicates the trade-off between SER perfor-
mance and computational complexity. With only one iteration,
the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the error floor
and outperform the MMSE detection in most SNR values even
the subblock size is small (e.g. subblock size is 3).
V. C ONCLUSIONS
We have proposed a MLD scheme for interleaved OFDMA
uplink using sphere decoding and GSIC. Subblock based
MLD is applied via sphere decoding to mitigate the main
interference from adjacent subcarriers, while GSIC is em-
ployed to remove the residual interference out of the subblock.
Simulation shows that the proposed scheme outperforms the
conventional MMSE detection and the PIC scheme without
sacrificing the computational efficiency.
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