A coded OFDM system for time-varying multipath Rayleigh fading environment

An OFDM system is considered as an effective technique in high data rate transmission under multipath fading channels. In this paper, we analyze the influence of interference due to the time variation and delay spread of mobile radio channels on an OFDM system. We obtain the bit error rate (BER) performance of the 16-QAM OFDM system. Then, we investigate the performance of the Reed-Solomon (RS) coded 16-QAM OFDM system when the number of sub-carriers varies. In the investigation, we assume that the information transmission rate and total bandwidth expansion (due to coding, guard interval, and number of sub-carriers) are fixed. Under this condition, it is observed that there are optimum numbers of sub-carriers that minimize the post decoding symbol error probability of the RS code for various channel states.