Autonomous driving in 5G: Mitigating interference in OFDM-based vehicular communications

Automotive industry will be greatly benefited by the advent of 5G Networking and the huge boost in performance and coverage it will support. Road safety and traffic efficiency services will be significantly upgraded through seamlessly interconnected devices, while latency decrease will most likely allow autonomous driving to become a commodity, available to everyone. This technology will have a huge societal and economical impact, since it will render severe traffic accidents, long commute times and increased energy consumption obsolete. Current vehicular communication systems are usually equipped with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transceivers that operate in suboptimal modes for the upcoming 5G standards. The problem originates in the existing intercarrier interference (ICI) on the receiver end, often partially tackled by integrated successive interference cancellation (OSIC) architectures. However, for decreasing complexity, system designers attempt to mitigate ICI by considering only a small number or sub-carriers, leading to error floor introduction and unacceptable bit-error-rates (BER). This paper presents an OSIC-based solution for cancelling interference in OFDM systems operating over specific conditions such as doubly selective channels. The experimental results indicated that the proposed equalizer outperforms all existing non-banded ICI cancellation methods, by achieving lower BER despite operating in a resource-savvy manner.