5 OFDM

In the last chapter we introduced the multipath propagation and its inuence on the transmission. In sec. 4.4 OFDM is mentioned as one possible solution for mitigating the inuence of delay spread and to increase the robustness of the transmission. Transmitting digital signals with high data rates using single carrier results in a lot of diculties because of the multipath propagation. Due to the short symbol time and the long channel response time for it, this results in very high requirements for the equaliser. Dividing the data rate in N subcarriers results in an N times longer symbol duration. In spite of this improvement there are still some inter-symbol-interferences due to the different runtimes of the signals in the multipath environment. To reduce the inter-symbolinterference a guard interval is introduced. This guard interval provides some time for the symbols to raise and decay. The following paragraph explains some special features of OFDM compared to other multi carrier systems. One of the most advantages is the abdication of complex lter banks due to the use of digital signal processing. A characteristic of an OFDM system is the equidistant subchannel order. The distance between dierent subchannels is chosen in a way that they do not disturb each other. To obtain this, the carriers of two adjacent subchannels are orthogonal. This results in the distance of two subchannels f = 1 . Ts (5.1)

Rectangular pulses are used for calculating the magnitude spectrum. In g. 5.1 the known (x ) form of the function si(x) = sin is shown. x Fig. 5.2 shows the spectrum of an OFDM signal as a composition of frequency shifted subcarriers. If the frequency shift is exactly an integer multiple of 1/T (refering to 5.1), the interference of adjacent cariers is equal to zero. There are no inter-carrier-interferences in spite of an overlapping spectrum.

5.1 Overview about an OFDM system

In this section we are going to shortly discuss the elements which can be found in an OFDM system. Some elements have been already discussed in previous chapters. In the following sections each of the new elements will be descriped in detail. Looking at our simulation chain so far, we notice that we have already discussed the OFDM system up to the encoder element. First new element we want to introduce is the interleaver. The interleaver is used to increase the performance gain by changing the bit order within the bitstream to avoid errors in adjacent bits caused by interferences on adjacent subchannels. How an interleaver is working is explained in sec. 5.2. The next element

57

5 OFDM

1.2 1 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0 0.2 0.4 5pi

4pi

3pi

2pi

1pi

pi

2pi

3pi

4pi

5pi

Figure 5.1: Sinc function

1.2 1 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0 0.2 0.4 5pi

4pi

3pi

2pi

1pi

pi

2pi

3pi

4pi

5pi

Figure 5.2: OFDM spectrum as a composition of frequency shifted subcarriers.

58

5 OFDM

Figure 5.3: OFDM-System overview is a serial to parallel converter (S/P). This converter translates our encoded serial data stream into N parallel data streams. These N data stream are in the next step mapped to the dierent subchannels. The mapping process itself is described in sec. 2.2. After the mapping we have with the IFFT the second new element. The IFFT is a method in digital signal processing and converts our subchannel signals from the frequency domain into a time domain signal. After the conversion into time domain the guard interval is inserted to eliminate inter-symbol-interference and the signal is send over the channel. At the receiver the rst step is to have syncronisation of the OFDM symbols using cyclic extension. At this point the additional guard interval is removed. In a second step the FFT of the signal is calculated. A further explanation about the FFT can be found in sec. 2.7.2 and in sec. 5.3. With the FFT the signal is converted back from time domain into frequency domain. As a result we obtain the N dierent subcarriers. In the parallel to serial converter the dierent subchannels are converted back to one single data stream. The rest of the OFDM system is the same as we had already introduced and discussed in sec. 3 and 2.

5.2 Interleaving
From the basic principles of OFDM, we know that in the frequency and time selective transmission environment, the channel does not change signicantly in one OFDM symbol or one OFDM sub-carrier, however it changes from sub-carrier to subcarrier in the frequency domain and symbol to symbol in the time domain. When the channel has a deep fading, some sub-carriers and some OFDM symbols will suer from strong noise interference, which causes a degrading SNR at these positions resulting in excessive burst errors at the receiver. To overcome this problem, coding and interleaving are employed in OFDM system. As we see in the diagram, the block of coding could be done by implementing the convolutional encoder that we discussed in chapter 3. In the rest of this section, we would focus on the block of interleaving. As mentioned above, interleaving is an ecient way to combat burst error, which is achieved by rearrange the order of the transmit bits. For example, g. 5.4 shows how a certain type of interleaver works. This interleaver simply writes the coded bits into the matrix by rows and then reads them out afterwards by columns. The deinterleaver at the receiver side performs the reverse procedure, i.e., the bits are written by columns and read out by rows. The bits in the gure are written row-by-row into a 6 8 matrix and reading out column-by-column. We dene the number of rows B = 6 as the interleaving depth,

59

5 OFDM

(b0, b8, b16, , b40) Read bits

( b0 , b1 , b2 , , b7 )

Write bits

b0 b8 b16 b24 b32 b40

b1 b9 b17 b25 b33 b41

... ... ... ... ... ...

b7 b15 b23 b31 b39 b47

Figure 5.4: Block Interleaver 8 6 and the number of columns N = 8 as the interleaving length. After this kind of interleaving, the fading processes that aect N successive symbols will be uncorrelated. Therefore, it makes the burst errors appear as random errors, which can be corrected by coding. Since the interleaver requires memory and deinterleaver causes extra delay (because deinterleaving takes place only after all the interleaved data is received), the dimension of the interleaver is a compromise between the delay and the performance of the system. Frequency interleaving is usually employed in IEEE802.11a standard, which is to interleave the information across the sub-carriers prior to transmissions. By implementing frequency interleaving in OFDM systems, the local deep fading is averaged over the whole bandwidth of the system. It is implemented for all the data symbols in a single OFDM symbol. The interleaving pattern shows us how to rearrange the order of the data symbols, which should be chosen according to the channel and the coding technique used. The following matlab code describe the interleaving pattern used in HIPERLAN type 2: cBitsPerBlock = nrDataCarriers*log2(length(map)); bitBlock = 0 : cBitsPerBlock-1; perm1 = (cBitsPerBlock/16)*rem(bitBlock, 16)+floor(bitBlock/16)+1; s2 = max([log2(length(map))/2 1]); perm2 = s2*floor((1/s2)*bitBlock)+rem(bitBlock+cBitsPerBlock-... floor((16/cBitsPerBlock)*bitBlock), s2)+1; perm = perm2(perm1); As shown above, all coded data bits shall be interleaved by a block interleaver with a block size corresponding to the number of bits in a single OFDM symbol, cBitsPerBlock. bitBlock represents the index of the coded bit. The interleaver is dened by a two step permutation. The rst ensures that adjacent coded bits are mapped onto nonadjacent sub-carriers, which is described in the third line. The second permutation ensures that adjacent coded bits are mapped alternately onto less and more signicant bits of the constellation, which is implemented in the 5th and 6th line.

60

5 OFDM

Task: With the dened interleaving pattern, the frequency interleaver can be implemented as following: if (~isempty(perm)) for ii = 0 : cBitsPerBlock : length(enc)-cBitsPerBlock enc(1, perm+ii) = enc(1, ii+1:ii+cBitsPerBlock); end end

where enc is the vector of encoded bits. The for-loop rearranges the coded bits according to the interleaving pattern described in perm. Try to understand how the code of interleaver works above, and explain it. Task: Based on the understanding of the interleaver, try to write a function of deinterleaver Y = deinterleaver(X,cBitsPerBlock,perm) \nonumber where X is the vector of input bits to the deinterleaver, cBitsPerBlock is the number of bits in a single OFDM symbol and perm represents the interleaving pattern discussed before.

5.3 Fast Fourier Transform

The complex baseband OFDM signal is the inverse Fourier transform of as many QAM input symbols as number of subcarriers are utilized. This is done by using the inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT), which represents a very quick algorithm to shorten the calculation of an inverse discrete Fourier transform (IDFT). For best performance, the number of FFT/IFFT input samples has to be N = 2n with n is a positive integer. When using the FFT algorithm, it has to be taken in account, that the N output samples are arranged as follows: index 0 n N/2 represents the values for positive frequencies and index N/2 < n < N represents the values for negative frequencies. Hence, the spectrum for positive and negative frequencies has to be ipped (rearranged) before applying the IFFT (see sec. 2.7.2). In this lab course, the MATLAB functions fft(), ifft(), fftshift() and ifftshift() will be utilized to do the transformation between time and frequency domain.

5.4 Cyclic Extension

Multipath propagation introduces delayed copies of the transmit OFDM symbols, which leads to inter symbol interference (ISI) at the receiver, since the end of the previous symbol interferes with the beginning of the current symbol. To avoid ISI, a so called guard interval seperates two adjacent OFDM symbols. Of course, only ISI caused by delays not longer

61

5 OFDM

.5pi

.5pi

pi

1.5pi

2pi

Figure 5.5: Cyclic extension (red) is copied before the OFDM symbol in time domain than the guard interval can be avoided by this method. Since the output of the IFFT (the OFDM symbol) is a periodic function, the guard interval is a copy of the last part of the OFDM symbol and pasted in front of this symbol. Fig. 5.5 shows the input of the cyclic extension.

5.5 OFDM Modulator/Demodulator

Task Write an m-le ofdm mod(in, numcarrier, guard) to build up an OFDM modulator. Calculate the number of OFDM symbols that can be created by distributing the elements of the QAM symbol stream in to the dierent carriers. Find out the appropriate length of the IFFT, which has to be a power of two. Rearrange the input stream vector to form a matrix, in which each column consists of one OFDM symbol. What is the dimension of this matrix. Preventing FFT inverts the spectrum, cut out the last half of the rows of the matrix and paste it before the rst half. In between these two halfs insert a block of zeros, thus the number of rows increases to the value of the FFT length. Now, apply the function ifft() to the matrix, hence the result is a matrix containing the time representation of the OFDM symbols (column wise). Adding the guard interval to each OFDM symbol is simply copying the last guard rows and pasting them in front of the rst row of the matrix. Task Write an m-le ofdm demod(in, numcarriers, guard) to build up an OFDM demodulator. Calculate the necessary FFT length, as it is done in the modulator part. Dene the variable symleng for the sum of FFT length and guard

62

5 OFDM interval, which results in the OFDM symbol length. Calculate the total number of OFDM symbols in the input stream. Rearrange the input vector in to a matrix with as many columns as number of OFDM symbols and with a number of rows corresponding to symleng. Crop the submatrix not belonging to the guard intervall and apply a FFT. After this, shift the second half of rows in front of the rst half and delete the frequency samples which do not belong to the used carriers.

5.6 OFDM Chain

In previous sections, we have discussed the elements which are included in a OFDM system. In the following, we would start to build a OFDM chain with the functions we implemented before. In the end of this section, we should have a complete OFDM chain built in a m function in Matlab, which allows us to do some performance evaluation later. Follow the descriptions below , which would dene the parameters that we use for the OFDM chain and also would help you to build the signal chain step by step. Assume we want to transmit 100 bursts of information signal, and each burst contains 24 OFDM symbols. The number of sub-carriers is set to 48, and we use 16QAM mapping here. The encoder employs a convolutional code of rate equals to 1/2 without any puncturing. Based on the description of the parameters above, try to calculate the number of bits that need to be generated by the source, and then use the function sig gen you have implemented in sect.2.1 to generate the amount of bits we want to transmit. As shown in g. 5.3, after the signal source there follows a block of coding, which we use here is a convolutional code of rate 1/2, and generator polynomials are G1 = 133, G2 = 171. Use the function convcode that we built before to implement the block of encoding here. The interleaving part is described in sect. 5.2, please use the interleaving pattern mentioned exactly as in that section. The bits are mapped to symbols through the block of mapping, which we have also implemented before. Check the function mapping, and make sure 16QAM scheme is adopted here. After mapping, there is a IFFT operation which is explained in sect.5.3, and then follows the operation of inserting the guard interval described in sect.5.4. What we use here is a guard interval of the length of 16 bits. The transmission channel employed here is the multipath channel which is described and implemented in sect.4.1,and at the receiver side comes the FFT operation, demapping (function demapping),deinterleaving(function deinterleaver), and decoding(function condecoder).

63

5 OFDM

5.7 OFDM performance analysis

In this performance chapter you should not only measure some parameters. Furthermore you are expected to think about some enhancements, that could be made to optimize an OFDM system. Task Run the simulation for dierent values of the guard interval and analyse the inuence on the BER performance. Try to calculate the throughput of the system and explain the inuence of the guard interval on the achievable maximum throughput. Make a comparison to the simulation chain of chapter 4. Think about some limitations of the presented OFDM system. How can the OFDM system as we have presented it be improved?

64

Bibliography
[1] Proakis, J. G.: 0071181830 Digital Communications. 4th ed. McGraw-Hill, 2001. ISBN

[2] The MathWorks: Communications Toolbox 3 Users Guide. http://www. mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/pdf_doc/comm/comm.pdf, March 2007 [3] ETSI EN 300 744 V1.5.1 (Hrsg.): Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB); Framing structure, channel coding and modulation for digital terrestrial television. ETSI EN 300 744 V1.5.1, November 2004 [4] Kattenbach, Ralph: Charakterisierung zeitvarianter Indoor-Funkkan ale anhand ihrer System- und Korrelationsfunktionen, Universit at Kassel, Diss., 1997 [5] Bello, P.: Characterization of Randomly Time-Variant Linear Channels. In: Communications, IEEE Transactions on [legacy, pre - 1988] 11 (1963), Nr. 4, S. 360393

65