Performance evaluation of COFDM for digital audio broadcasting. I. Parametric study

This paper describes the performance of COFDM (coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) for digital audio broadcasting (DAB) over various multipath mobile radio channels. COFDM is a channel coding and modulation scheme which mitigates the adverse effects of fading by using wideband multicarrier modulation combined with time interleaving and a convolutional error correcting code. A guard interval is inserted at the transition between successive symbols to absorb the intersymbol interference created by the time domain spread of the mobile radio channel. The decoding process is performed using differential demodulation in conjunction with a soft decision Viterbi decoder. The COFDM evaluation is done by means of computer simulations. A parametric study of the proposed COFDM system is done in this first of a series of papers to determine the optimal system parameter values for operation at a radio frequency of 1.5 GHz. The results show that the parameter values proposed in the standard are indeed well suited for operation at 1.5 GHz. Using the set of optimal parameter values found, the COFDM performance is then evaluated in mobile radio channels typical of different geographical environments. Simulation results confirm the benefit that the system gains from frequency diversity found in the urban and hilly terrain areas.