Evaluation of OFDM Systems With Virtual Carriers Over V2V Channels

Computational complexity and spectral efficiency are key components on the implementation of vehicular communication systems. However, in order to counteract the intercarrier interference (ICI) in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems, it's usual to resort receivers with high computational complexity or reduced spectral efficiency. This paper analyzes the inclusion of virtual carriers (V C) as a mean to reduce the ICI and the computational complexity required by the nonlinear ordered successive interference cancellation (OSIC). From the simulation results, it is demonstrated that using VC provides 90% reduction in the computational cost required for executing data detection, as well as a gain of 5 dB compared to conventional OFDM system with linear detection. In addition, the system is tested for different rates of channel coding obtaining results that show VC to be a convenient technique for reducing system complexity with low impact on the system throughput.