Intercarrier interference analysis for wireless OFDM in mobile channels

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) employs a set of subcarriers for the information symbol transmission in parallel via the multipath fading channels. Due to its spectral efficiency and robustness over multipath channels, OFDM has been adopted for broadband communications. However, for high-speed mobility, the time-varying channels pose a performance limitation to the wireless OFDM systems. In this paper, we investigate the OFDM system performance in the time-varying channels where the intercarrier interference (ICI) occurs; we study the impacts of the time-varying multipath fadings together with the multiple Doppler spreads. According to our analysis and simulation results, the maximum OFDM symbol normalized Doppler frequency must be less than 0.04 to achieve the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) = 20 dB or larger. As the maximum OFDM symbol normalized Doppler frequency increases, the OFDM system performance degrades dramatically. Different irreducible symbol error rate (SER) floors about 10
_-2
for QPSK-OFDM schemes and 10
_-1
for 16QAM-OFDM schemes would arise in case that the maximum OFDM symbol normalized Doppler frequency is fixed at 0.06