Experimental SEFDM Pipelined Iterative Detection Architecture with Improved Throughput

In spectrally efficient frequency division multiplexing (SEFDM), the separation between subcarriers is reduced below the Nyquist criteria, enhancing bandwidth utilisation in comparison to orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). This leads to self-induced inter-carrier interference (ICI) in the SEFDM signal, which requires more sophisticated detectors to retrieve the transmitted data. In previous work, iterative detectors (IDs) have been used to recover the SEFDM signal after processing a certain number of iterations, however, the sequential iterative process increases the processing time with the number of iterations, leading to throughput reduction. In this work, ID pipelining is designed and implemented in software defined radio (SDR) to reduce the overall system detection latency and improve the throughput. Thus, symbols are allocated into parallel IDs that have no waiting time as they are received. Our experimental findings show that throughput will improve linearly with the number of the paralleled ID elements, however, hardware complexity also increases linearly with the number of ID elements.