CHAPTER 4

WAVELET PACKET BASED OFDM

4.1 INTRODUCTION
OFDM is a special form of multicarrier transmission technique which is widely
applied in wireless communication systems due to its high rate transmission
capability with high bandwidth efficiency and its robustness with regards to
multipath fading and delay. Another important advantage is its high flexibility, for
example the data rate can be adapted easily to the available OSNR . Conventional
OFDM implementation uses Fourier transform as the orthogonal transform to
generate the signal waveform from densely spaced low rate subcarriers. These
subcarriers are orthogonal, that is the key feature of OFDM to prevent inter carrier
interference (ICI). As sinusoids are infinitely long in time domain, a proper
windowing has to be applied, which consequently causes out-of-band radiation in
frequency domain and performance degradation on dispersive channels because of
inter-symbol interference (ISI) . In order to prevent ISI due to CD, a cyclic prefix
(CP) can be appended to each OFDM block, which increases the tolerance to CD
significantly. However, the addition of CP imposes an increase in required
bandwidth and sampling rate of DA/AD converters which are already at their limits
for high data rates. In place of Fourier transform, the orthogonality of the subcarriers
can also be satisfied via wavelet transform, another orthogonal transform whose
basis functions are wavelets rather than sinusoids. Wavelets have finite length in
time domain and can be designed to have high frequency localization. Wavelets exist
for different applications such as data compression and signal de-noising. Besides,
new wavelets can be designed according to specific requirements. Wavelet transform
belongs to the family of overlapped transforms, i.e. the beginning of a symbol is
transmitted before the previous one ends. The inter-symbol orthogonality is
maintained due to the shift orthogonal property of the waveforms . This overlapping
feature increases the symbol duration and hence yields a better spectral containment

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along with higher CD-tolerance. On the other hand, because of the overlapping of the
symbols in time domain, CP is not available for wavelets.
4.2 FAST FOURIER TRANSFORM
Fast Fourier transform is the most popular transform that is used to obtain frequency
spectrum of the signals. It is an algorithm which is used to find the Discrete Fourier
Transform in a faster way and with reduced complexity. It is best suited for signals
whose frequency components do not change with time. The data generator is used
for bit stream and it is modulated using M-ary PSK or M-ary QAM modulators to
map input data into symbols. These symbols are sent to IFFT block to generate N
parallel data streams simultaneously over the subcarriers.
For a given finite sequence of data x(n) ,
x(n) , n=0 to N-1 (4.1)
the output in frequency domain is given as ,
N−1
X(k)= ∑ x ( n ) e
− jk ( 2Nπ ) n k= 0 to N-1 (4.2)
n =0

Where X(k) is the spectrum component due to the frequency,

The transformed output is added with cyclic prefix to decrease the ISI effects of
channel.
In the receiver the reverse operation is performed by removing cyclic prefix, FFT
modulation and demodulation to obtain the original data.
In Fourier analysis we break up a signal into a set of an infinite sum of Sines and
Cosines to exploit the orthogonality relationship between them. The large spectral
overlap between frequency responses of filters corresponding to different sub
channels is weakness of DFT. This can lead to substantial leakage of power between
sub channels and consequently induce inter channel interference. Therefore, an
efficient Discrete Wavelet can be used in order to improve sub-channel separation, in
which perfect reconstruction filters are used as transceivers.

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4.3 WAVELET PACKET TRANSFORM

DWT-based OFDM is an efficient approach to substitute FFT in conventional
OFDM systems. The traditional Fourier based OFDM system, because of its
excellent performance for wireless transmission of signals is preferred from a long
time. In Fourier systems, as described in 4.2, a signal is break into a set of an
infinite signal that is a summation of the sines and cosines to exploit the orthogonal
relationship between them. On the other hand, in the wavelet transform, firstly the
signal is broken down by two filters, that is a Low Pass Filter (LPF) and a High Pass
Filter (HPF) . During this decomposition of signals by two filters, the signal is down-
sampled at the filter outputs, as half of the frequency components are filtered out at
the output of these filters. Wavelet transform is applied in order to reduce the
addition of cyclic prefix that helps in decreasing the wastage of bandwidth and
increase the efficiency.
In Wavelet transform, the signal that is to be transformed is decomposed into a set of
basis waveform functions, named as wavelets, that helps in providing a way for the
analysis of signals by making an investigation on the coefficients of transformed
functions i.e. wavelets. A wavelet is being used in various applications and has
become very attractive to use among engineers, technologists and mathematicians.
The basic functions of this transform make it a powerful tool by localizing both in
time and frequency domains and by possessing different resolutions in respective
domains . Different resolutions corresponds to analyze the behavior of the process
and the power of the transform. A low pass filter and high pass filter, two filters are
implemented to work and satisfy a perfect reconstruction with ortho normal
properties. In the wavelet-based system, the signals after modulation are sent for
transmission by making use of zero padding and applying vector transpose on that.
The wavelet technique is an efficient and flexible method that can be used for
decomposition of signals as shown in figure 4.1.

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 Wavelet Packet based OFDM

Figure 4.1 Block Diagram of Wavelet Decomposition [Weeam]

In wavelet transform, the signal is first decomposed by low pass and high pass filter.
Half of the frequency components have been filtered out at filter outputs and can be
down sampled. Finally, approximate and detail coefficients from g(n) and h(n) filters
are gotten respectively as shown in figure 4.1, where g(n) and h(n) are the wavelet’s
half band low pass filter and high pass filter impulse response respectively, and φ lpf
and φ hpf is approximate and details coefficients respectively as can be written as ,

k=∞
φ lpf (n)= ∑ S ( k ) g (2 n−k ) (4.3)
k=−∞

k=∞
φ hpf (n) = ∑ S ( k ) h(2 n−k ) (4.4)
k=−∞

Figure 4.2 Three level Decomposition Wavelet Transform (DWT) [Weeam]

Figure 4.2 shows three level decomposition wavelet transform [Hasan M] . The
multi-level DWT is computed by successive low pass and high pass filters of the

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discrete time-domain signal. At each level, the high pass filter produces detail
information denoted by d(n), while the low pass filter associated with scaling
function produces coarse approximations denoted by a(n) . At each decomposition
level, the half band filters produce signals spanning only half the frequency band.
This doubles the frequency resolution as the uncertainty in frequency is reduced by
half. The decimation by 2 halves the time resolution as the entire signal is now
represented by only half the number of samples. Thus, while the half band low pass
filtering removes half of the frequencies and thus halves the resolution, the
decimation by 2 doubles the scale. The filtering and decimation process is continued
until the desired level is reached. The DWT of the original signal is then obtained by
concatenating all the coefficients of approximation and detail starting from the last
level of decomposition.

Figure 4.3 Three Level Reconstruction Wavelet Transform [Weeam]

Figure 4.3 depicts the reconstruction of original signal from wavelet coefficients.
Basically, reconstruction is the reverse process of decomposition. The approximation
and detail coefficients are up sampled by 2 by passing through low pass and high
pass filters and then gets added. This process is continued through the same number
of levels as in decomposition process to obtain the original signal. Haar, Daubechies,
Symlets and Coiflets are a different wavelet family types that can be used in
communication systems. These wavelet families have different filter length and
values of approximated and detailed coefficients that can be used [Weaam].

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4.4 SYSTEM DEISGN AND RESULTS

4.4.1 SYSTEM CONFIGURATION

Figure 4.4 Block diagram WPT-OFDM [U.D]

The basic block diagram is shown in figure 4.1, A serial stream of N number of data
is converted into parallel and after suitable modulation out of BPSK, QPSK etc, the
respective N number of subcarriers reaches IFFT/IDWT block. In Conventional
OFDM, IFFT is performed and the required frequency to time domain conversion
has been done. The System becomes DWT Wavelet based by swapping IFFT and
FFT modules with respective IDWT and DWT modules. The Cyclic prefix (CP) is
added to the output of IFFT in a way to keep away the signal from ICI and ISI. This
is done by extending the symbol with its repetition applied at the end. The resultant
output signal is then transmitted. The addition of CP increases the system
complexity. For DWT system, there is no requirement of CP, which makes these
system less complicated to implement. The cyclic prefix is the redundant data which

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restricts the useful data rate . By doing this, data rate and hence the efficiency can be
improved. This motivates the use of DWT based OFDM that does not use cyclic
prefix.
4.4.2 RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

The performance of DWT and FFT OFDM has been investigated using MATLAB
tool with V. R2011b. Graphical results shows the Bit Error Rate probabilities of
both the systems. The results presented shows the BER performance as a function of
energy per bit to noise ratio.

Parameters Values for FFT Values For DWT

Number of Subcarriers 256 256

Modulation Type BPSK BPSK

Channel Used AWGN AWGN

Cyclic Prefix Required Not required

Wavelet used N/A Haar, Daubechie .

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 Wavelet Packet based OFDM

0
BER vs SNR PLOTS
10
FFT
DWT
-1
10

-2
10
BER

-3
10

-4
10

0 5 10 15
Eb/No (dB)

Figure 4.5 Simulation Result for FFT and DWT based system for AWGN channel

The Simulation Results is observed for FFT based System. Performance of

two Systems is compared. For observing the BER performance FFT size is
kept 256, data is transferred in parallel streams on different symbols. SNR
range is taken from 0 to 15 with difference of 1.

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 Wavelet Packet based OFDM

0
OFDM alone BER PLOTS
10
haar
db2
db4
-1
10 db8

-2
10
BER

-3
10

-4
10

0 5 10 15
Eb/No (dB)

Figure 4.5 Simulation Results for DWT OFDM with different waveforms

In figure 4.5 Simulation results are shown of different DWT Waveforms. Results are
best achieved by haar wavelet. For each SNR , BER is calculated. The BER
performance for FFT OFDM is observed for AWGN channel in figure 4.4. BER
value is also calculated for Theoretical value. This result is compared with the
simulated result. It is observed that both the results are mostly having similarity. We
will get the sharp and accurate response for bit error rate as we increase the number
iterations. For different random data, simulated result will be different. Results of
DWT is better than Conventional FFT. In figure 4.5, Simulation parameters are taken
for Wavelet system to observe the BER performance using different wavelets. Haar,
Daubechies, Symlet and Coiflet wavelets are used to analyze the performance.
Random digital data is generated and same data is passed through different wavelet
systems. It is observed that Haar wavelet gives the better performance than other
wavelets. Random data is rotated through the system for equal number of SNR value.

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For other wavelets it is observed that, the Bit error value remain constant at
particular level. For better performance of system it is expected that, BER value
should be decreased for increasing SNR value. Each wavelet has its own
characteristics and shape of signal. So, it affect on performance.

0
OFDM alone BER PLOTS
10
dwt haar
FFT
-1
10

-2
10
BER

-3
10

-4
10

0 5 10 15
Eb/No (dB)

Figure 4.6 Comparision of FFT and DWT with haar Wavelet.

Figure 4.6 shows that Discrete Wavelet Transform performs better than FFT in each
case, with each wavelet type. DWT is best to decrease ICI and Dispersions.

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