New flexible OFDM structure for consumer electronics communication systems

This paper introduces a promising property in which the transmitter of an OFDM system can utilize an N-point IFFT operation to build the time-domain symbols of a KN-point IFFT operation. Based on this property, we propose a flexible OFDM structure. This structure will support uplink applications which include many transmitters using different numbers of subcarriers and one receiver with just one IFFT/FFT module with the subcarriers of least common multiple (LCM) for the number of subcarriers of all the transmitters. Therefore it reduces the design complexities of the receiver and increases the compatible characteristics for consumer electronics (CE). Compared with the original OFDM system, the proposed system improves the performance of the packet error ratio (PER) and the bit error ratio (BER) performance by using the appropriate K. In addition, the proposed structure can be designed to enlarge the bandwidth efficiency of the system and improve the performance of channel estimation compared with the OFDM/TDM system.