| Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), employed in broadband communications, provides high bit rates with robustness to channel impairments. OFDM also provides an efficient method to conserve bandwidth while transmitting high data rates. However, OFDM presents certain challenges such as sensitivity to frequency and timing offsets between the transmitter and the receiver and the high peak to average power ratio. These challenges, which cause synchronization issues and cause-ineffective system operations, form the focus of the thesis. There are numerous signal processing algorithms proposed to combat these problems. The thesis presents the design of a generic OFDM system, which implements algorithms to deal with synchronization and peak to average power ratio (PAPR) issues. Based on the OFDM system design, the thesis presents an OFDM test bed, which provides a framework to integrate various synchronization and PAPR algorithms according to user's choice into the OFDM system. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
