Hybrid Prefix OFDM Transmission Toward Future Wireless Communications

Prefix-based multicarrier transmission is in wide application in current wireless communications, at the expense of extra redundancy and reduced spectral efficiency. In this contribution, we propose a novel hybrid prefix (HP) structure, which can offer higher spectral efficiency for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based future wireless communications, such as 5G and beyond systems. Compared with the conventional prefix aided OFDM scheme, the proposed HP-OFDM scheme is capable of reducing the average length of the prefix with the aid of a proposed low-complexity detector for efficient signal restoration. We also quantify the signal to interference plus noise and the achievable rate of the proposed HP-OFDM scheme through a theoretical analysis. Furthermore, the bit-error rate (BER) of the proposed HP-OFDM is also theoretically derived. Our scheme results demonstrate that HP-OFDM is capable of reducing the prefix overhead by 50% compared with prefix-aided OFDM, while achieving a BER comparable to that of prefix-aided OFDM.