Self-coherent OFDM for wireless communications

In this paper, we present self-coherent OFDM, a well-known non-coherent technique in optical communications, for wireless RF communications. Self-coherent OFDM is known to have complete immunity against phase noise using a simple RF front-end receiver and to provide a significantly higher spectral efficiency than self-het OFDM, which uses at most 50% of the available spectrum for communications. We present the performance analysis of self-coherent OFDM over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and frequency selective fading channels. We show by simulations that self-coherent OFDM provides not only a higher spectral efficiency but also a better bit error rate (BER) performance than self-het OFDM. Finally, we discuss the impact on the system performance of the filters design parameters used in the self-coherent OFDM receiver.