NPTEL MOOC on “Principles of Modern CDMA/ MIMO/ OFDM Wireless Communications”

[NOC15 EC05]

Aditya Jagannatham
Associate Professor
Dept. of Electrical Engineering
IIT Kanpur
adityaj@iitk.ac.in

Solutions to Assignment#8

1. Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is used in Long Term Evolution (LTE), Worldwide Interoperability for
Microwave Access (WiMAX), which are 4G cellular technologies as well as 802.11a for WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network).
Hence, answer is “All of the above” i.e. Ans d
2. For each subcarrier to experience flat fading, we need OFDM symbol time T > Td = 3 s  N/B > 3 s  N > B  3 s = 10 
106 Hz  3 s = 30. Therefore, minimum number of subcarriers required is 30. Ans d
3. Difference between multi-carrier modulation (MCM) and Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is that while
OFDM is based on IFFT/ FFT operation to generate the “sampled” transmit signal, MCM is based on generating the continuous
transmit signal using modulators. Hence Ans b
4. OFDM involves which of the following steps FFT operation at the receiver and NOT the transmitter. Also, the IFFT operation is
at the transmitter and NOT the receiver. The removal of cyclic prefix is at the receiver and NOT the transmitter. Hence, only
one option is correct i.e. addition of cyclic prefix at transmitter. Ans d
5. Consider the symbols X(0) = 1, X(1) = 0, X(2) = -1 and X(3) = j. Since number of symbols is 4, the number of subcarriers is N = 4.
The generated OFDM samples without cyclic prefix are given by the 4 pt IFFT i.e.
kl kl 
1 3 j 2 1 3 j 2 1 3
xl    X k e N   X k e 4   X k e 2 
j kl

N k 0 4 k 0 4 k 0
It can be seen that the 4 pt IFFT of [1,0,-1,j] is 0.25j, 0.75, -0.25j, 0.25
Hence Ans c
6. Consider OFDM symbols with cyclic prefix (CP). The length of the channel impulse response of the channel filter be L i.e. we
have channel taps h(0), h(1), …, h(L-1). The minimum length L of the cyclic prefix required i.e. minimum number of samples in
the CP can be calculated as follows. Consider the first output of the OFDM symbol block corresponding to x(0). This is given as,
h(0)x(0) + h(1) x(N-1) + h(2)x(N-2) + … + h(L-1)x(N-L+1)
It can be seen that to avoid IBI, the CP should be symbols x(N-L+1), x(N-L+2), …, x(N-2), x(N-1). Hence, minimum number of
symbols in CP is L-1. Ans c
7. As described in the lectures, in OFDM, cyclic prefix is added to Avoid inter block interference. Ans b
8. As described in the lectures, after addition of the CP in an OFDM system, the output of the channel i.e. signal at the receiver
after removal of CP is Circular convolution in time domain between OFDM signal and channel taps. Ans c
9. OFDM converts a frequency selective channel into N parallel flat-fading channels, where N is the number of subcarriers. Ans b
10. Given an OFDM system with bandwidth 10 MHz and number of subcarriers 1024. The cyclic prefix comprises of 1/8 of number
of samples from the tail of the OFDM symbol prefixed in the front. The total time of the resulting OFDM symbol with CP can be
calculated as follows. Raw OFDM symbol time without CP is N/B = 1024/10MHz. CP comprises of 1/8 of samples in OFDM
symbol  Total time = (1+1/8)  N/B = (9/8)  (1024/(10  106)) = 115.2 s. Ans b
11. Inputs to IFFT block in the OFDM system are the modulated symbols loaded onto subcarriers. Ans a
12. Given an OFDM system with dB noise power 2 = 10 dB  2 = 10. Number of subcarriers N = 1024 subcarriers. The noise
power in dB at the output of the FFT in the OFDM system is N2 = 1024  10. Noise power at output in dB is
 10  log10(210  10) = 3  10 + 10 = 40 dB
Ans a
13. The assumption used in lectures to derive the variance of the channel coefficient across each subcarrier in the OFDM system is
Uncorrelated scattering. Ans d
14. The BER in the OFDM system as a function of the transmit SNR = P/2, number of subcarriers N, number of channel taps L is
given as
 L 
   SNR 
1 N  1 1
 1  
2 L 2 L 
 2    SNR   SNR 
 N  N 
 
Given dB noise power 2 = 6 dB  2 = 4, number of channel taps L = 12, number of subcarriers N = 256. Therefore, we have,
1 1 1 256
10 6   P   4  106
2 12 P 2 12

256 4
Power in dB  76 dB
Ans c
15. As can be seen from the solution to the above problem, the BER in the OFDM system decreases approximately as
1 1 N 1 1
 
2 L  2 L SNR SNR
 SNR 
N 
Hence, diversity order = 1 since BER decrease is proportional to 1/SNR. Ans b