Low Complexity CFO Compensation in Uplink OFDMA Systems With Receiver Windowing

Orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems in the uplink suffer from multiple access interference (MAI) due to their high sensitivity to frequency misalignments between different users. In this paper, we propose the application of time domain receiver windowing methods to confine the leakage caused by multiple carrier frequency offsets (CFOs) to a few neighboring subcarriers with almost no additional computational burden. The CFO effects can be translated into a linear system of equations with a coefficient matrix that is called interference matrix. As a result of receiver windowing, we can approximate the interference matrix with a quasi-banded one by neglecting its small elements outside a certain bandwidth. This allows us to propose a class of low complexity CFO compensation techniques. These techniques are applicable to the generalized subcarrier allocation scheme (G-CAS). The complexity reduction in the proposed solutions is substantial when compared to the existing ones in the literature. It is worth mentioning that this substantial complexity reduction is achieved in expense of some bandwidth efficiency loss. Hence, there exists a tradeoff between bandwidth efficiency and complexity. Solutions based on both zero forcing (ZF) and minimum mean squared error (MMSE) criteria are proposed and compared. Simulation results demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in approaching the optimal performance are also presented.