Interchannel interference analysis of OFDM in a mobile environment

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with a suitably chosen guard interval is an effective means of eliminating intersymbol interference for high-rate transmission over fading dispersive channels. Time variations of the channel, however, lead to a loss of subchannel orthogonality, resulting in interchannel interference (ICI). The article examines the effects of ICI through analysis and simulation, in the context of a system design for HDTV digital video broadcasting to mobile receivers. It is shown that ICI can be modeled as an additive Gaussian random process that leads to an error floor which can be determined analytically as a function of the Doppler frequency. Antenna diversity and trellis coding are then examined as methods for reducing this error floor.