Optimum beamforming for pre-FFT OFDM adaptive antenna array

It is well known that orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is robust to frequency-selective fading in wireless channels due to the exploitation of a guard interval that is inserted at the beginning of each OFDM symbol. However, once delayed signals beyond the guard interval are introduced in a channel with a large delay spread, intersymbol interference causes a severe degradation in the transmission performance. In this paper, we propose a novel pre-fast Fourier transform (FFT) OFDM adaptive antenna array, which requires only one FFT processor at a receiver, for suppressing such delayed signals. We derive the optimum weight set for beamformers based on the maximum signal-to-noise-and-interference power ratio (Max-SNIR) and the minimum mean square error (mmse) criteria, respectively. In addition, we propose a novel mmse-criterion-based commutative optimization scheme, which is more robust to the estimation error of the channel state information. Furthermore, we show the equivalence between the Max-SNIR-criterion-based scheme and the proposed commutative optimization scheme. Computer simulation results show its good performance even in channels where directions of arrival of arriving waves are randomly determined.