Why OFDM?

multipath and data rate

OFDM is the optimal solution to cancel ISI

Delay spread of the multipath channel has to be less

than the symbol duration for flat fading

1
 What is OFDM?

•A multicarrier scheme in which the bandwidth of the channel is divided into

subcarriers and data symbols are modulated and transmitted on each subcarrier
simultaneously
•Multiple subcarriers carry samples sent at a lower rate : only some of the channels are
affected by multipath effect

3
Narrow band vs Broadband transmission

4
Combat Inter Symbol Interference

5
OFDM: Reduces impact of ISI

6
 Subcarrier Orthogonality in time
domain
 every subcarrier has an integer number of cycles within the
symbol period. The number of cycles between adjacent
subcarriers differs by exactly one.

7
 Subcarrier Orthogonality in
frequency domain
Conventional FDM:
•Non-Overlapping spectra
•Use of guard bands to avoid interference
• bandpass filtering for extraction at Rx
•Waste of Spectrum

OFDM : Overlapping of Spectrum, makes it spectrally efficient: almost 50% bandwidth saving
Subcarriers can be extracted by baseband processing
Subcarrier spectrum has “Nyquist zero ISI Pulse shape

8
FDM vs OFDM: Bandwidth saving

9
If N is the number of subcarriers and Ts is the symbol duration,

Special choice of Pulse shape: The Nyquist zero ISI Pulse

10
The ideal OFDM technique

11
Generation of OFDM symbols
 A series of digital data stream is first modulated using
typically QPSK/ QAM into data symbols which are then
converted from Serial to Parallel, and these symbols
modulate the subcarriers
 Subcarriers are sampled with sampling rate N/Ts
 Samples on each subcarrier are summed to form the OFDM
symbol consisting of N samples
 The baseband OFDM symbol is modulated by a carrier to
become a bandpass signal and transmitted to receiver, i.e. In
the frequency domain, all the subcarriers are translated to
the carrier frequency simultaneously.

12
13
14
OFDM Modulation

15
OFDM Implementation
 Take N symbols and place one symbol on
each subcarrier (freq.)

freq0

freqN-1

 To make the IFFT input vector a power of

2 for implementation efficiency zero
padding is done
16
Parallel symbol transmission in OFDM

17
OFDM TRANSCEIVER

18
Illustration of OFDM baseband symbol

 Simple Example with 8 bits Data: 00011011

 QPSK subcarrier modulation, 4 subcarriers
 X1= 00 1+j ; X2= 011-j;
 X3=10-1+j; X4= 11 -1-j;
 4-point FFT: x= ifft(X)= [0 0.5+0.5jj 0.5-0.5j]
 4 samples :[ 0 0.5+0.5j j 0.5-0.5j] : these samples will be
modulating a high frequency carrier wave
 ISI mitigation in OFDM
 For transmission in channel with a
coherence bandwidth of 50 KHz in a
system with a total available BW of 1MHz ,
how many subcarrier OFDM system should
be used for ISI free transmission?

106
NBN  B, BN  BC , BN  0.1BC , N   N  200  256
5000

Avoids the use of complex

time domain equalizer
Example: IEEE 802.11a/g OFDM

 Nc = No of subcarriers = 48 + 16(zero padding)

 The data vector is of 48 symbols(only 48 subcarriers are
used) : 8 zeros are added to each side of the data vector
 FFT size : 64
 Cyclic Prefix : 16 samples. [DESIGN PARAMETER]
 Total No. Of samples per symbol = 64+16=80
 System Bandwidth : 20M Hz
 SYMBOL DURATION = 80/20M = 4 micro-sec
 Data duration = 3.2 micro-sec ; CP duration = 0.8 micro-sec
 Note: each sample duration is 0.05 micro-sec
 Sampling rate 20 x 106 samples /sec
 FFT sampling frequency also has to be 20MHz

21