Highly efficient TIBWB-OFDM waveform for broadband wireless communications

The Time-Interleaved Block Windowed Burst Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (TIBWB-OFDM) waveform enables to achieve greater confinement in the signal spectrum. This improves with the increase of the window roll-off since the out of band (OOB) radiation drops. However, the TIBWB-OFDM block duration also increases, which leads to a decrease in the transmission rate for a given band, limiting, therefore, the spectral efficiency gains of the system. In this paper, we propose an alternative method for TIBWB-OFDM symbol construction by allowing a partial overlap between adjacent windowed OFDM symbols that compose it. This improves the spectral efficiency at the expense of introduced interference between the signal’s blocks, that deteriorates the Bit Error Rate (BER) performance. To avoid these BER performance losses, we propose a modified receiver design that includes the cancellation of block overlapping effects in the time domain. The proposed receiver is shown to be able to achieve excellent performance, even with the strong overlapping effects of a TIBWB-OFDM system with high spectral efficiency.