General ICI self-cancellation scheme for OFDM systems

One of the challenges in designing orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems is their inherent sensitivity to any frequency shift in the signal. A frequency offset between the local oscillators at the transmitter and receiver causes a single frequency shift in the signal, while a time-varying channel can cause a spread of frequency shifts known as the Doppler spread. Frequency shifts ruin the orthogonality of OFDM subcarriers and cause intercarrier interference (ICI); therefore, quickly diminishing the performance of the system. ICI self-cancellation schemes have been proposed to reduce the sensitivity of OFDM systems to frequency shifts. These schemes use signal processing and frequency domain coding to reduce the amount of ICI generated as a result of frequency shifts, with little additional computational complexity. These methods can be used as an alternative to the fine frequency-offset estimation methods to battle oscillator frequency offset or simply be used as an ICI mitigation technique when the system is operating over time-varying channels. We propose a general ICI self-cancellation scheme that can be implemented through windowing at the transmitter and receiver. We show that the previously proposed self-cancellation schemes are equivalent to special cases of this method. Through theoretical analysis of the signal-to-interference ratio and bit-error rate and the use of Monte Carlo simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed system considerably outperforms the existing systems in the presence of frequency offset or time variations in the channel. We consider both coherent and noncoherent systems.