Diversity performance of precoded OFDM with MMSE equalization

Two sets of bit error rate (BER) lower bounds for precoded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems using minimum mean square error (MMSE) equalization over frequency-selective multipath fading channels are evaluated by Monte Carlo method in this paper. The first set represents the best performance under different data group sizes used for precoding, whereas the second set represents the best performance under different channel multipath diversity orders. These performance bounds can serve as the guidelines for system designers to decide proper data group sizes for precoded OFDM systems in order to achieve better trade-off between system performance and complexity. Numerical results also confirm the usefulness of these lower bounds for practical OFDM systems.