On the Impact of Carrier Frequency Offsets in OFDM/SDMA Systems

The combined OFDM/SDMA approach has raised lots of research interests recently as it appears to be quite suitable for future broadband wireless transmission. In order to build practical OFDM/SDMA systems, we need the performance evaluation of such systems under real-world conditions. The performance degradation exists of an OFDM/SDMA system due to carrier frequency offsets (CFO), because single-user plain OFDM is highly sensitive to CFO. However, the characteristic of the degradation is not clear. In this paper, the impact of CFO on the performance of an uplink OFDM/SDMA system is analyzed. Different from the existing analysis, we jointly consider the impact of CFO on channel estimation and multi-user signal detection. Analytical expressions are derived for the variance of channel estimation error and multi-user signal detection error in the presence of CFO, whose accuracies are validated by simulation results. Observations related to channel estimation accuracy and the interaction of the CFO effects from different users are also given.