Performance analysis of a coded OFDM system in time-varying multipath Rayleigh fading channels

We analyze the combined influence of the interchannel and intersymbol interferences, which result from the time variation and delay spread of mobile channels, on the performance of an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) system. Both analysis and simulation results are presented for uncoded 16-QAM. We also investigate the performance of a Reed-Solomon (RS) coded 16-QAM OFDM system when the number of subcarriers varies: it is observed that there is an optimum number of subcarriers that minimizes the post decoding symbol error probability of the RS code for each channel state.