Analysis and cancellation of inter-carrier interference for OFDM systems over time-variant multipath fading channels

The orthogonality among the subcarriers of OFDM systems may be impaired by the time-selectivity of the fading channels. The loss of the orthogonality results in ICI, and if it is not treated appropriately, the system performance may not be improved only by increasing the signal-to-noise ratio. In other words, ICI results in error floors. This research work concentrates on the ICI analysis and cancellation, and also on the effects of channel time-selectivity on the OFDM systems over frequency-selective time-variant mobile fading channels. In the first part of this study, a general time-variant frequency-selective WSSUS fading channel model is further characterized to support the OFDM ICI analysis, thus the obtained results are applicable for many specific channels. We then identify the cause of the ICI, i.e. how the orthogonality among the subcarriers of OFDM systems is impaired. The average ICI power and its distribution are obtained based on the general time-variant frequency-selective WSSUS fading channel model. To mitigate the ICI caused by the channel time-selectivity for OFDM systems, in the second part of this study, an efficient ICI cancellation scheme is designed based on the obtained ICI power distribution. The simulation results indicate that a significant performance improvement can be achieved. For OFDM systems, differential encoding can be performed not only between the information bits of the same subcarrier of the consecutive OFDM symbols (inter-frame differential encoding), but also between the information bits of the adjacent subcarriers of the same OFDM symbol (inter-carrier differential encoding). In the third part of this study, we compare the performance of inter-frame and inter-carrier differential detection for OFDM systems over multipath time-variant mobile fading channels. The objective is to identify which differential encoding scheme (inter-frame or inter-carrier) is more robust to the channel time-selectivity, when OFDM systems are experiencing both frequency-selective and time-selective fading. The conditions under which the inter-carrier differential encoding outperforms the inter-frame differential encoding and vice-versa are provided.