Packet Design and Signal Processing for OFDM-Based Mobile Broadband Wireless Communication Systems

We consider improving the performance of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM)-based mobile broadband wireless communication (MBWC) systems. We show that a recently approved packet-based MBWC standard can cause the resulting systems to suffer from severe performance degradations for time-varying channels due to the lack of a mechanism for tracking the time-varying channels needed for coherent detection. We consider both packet design and signal processing to deal with time-varying channels. For the packet design, we segment an entire packet into multiple subpackets—with each subpacket having zero tail bits to reset the convolutional channel encoder—so that the detection/decoding result of each subpacket can be used to update the channel response for this subpacket. For signal processing, we use weighted polynomial fitting and prediction at the receiver to improve the channel tracking accuracy. Simulation results show that the coherent detection based on our new scheme can significantly outperform the commonly suggested differential modulation/detection methods.