Performance of MRC Detection in OFDM System with Virtual Carriers over V2V Channels

The vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications require to transmit over doubly selective channels (DSC) with high intercarrier interference (ICI). These characteristics degrade the performance significantly in terms of bit error rate (BER) of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. State-of-theart solutions involve receivers with high computational complexity or a reduced system spectral efficiency. This paper investigates the BER performance of OFDM system with virtual carriers (VC) employing the maximal ratio combining (MRC)-based low-complexity detector. The results obtained show that the use of VC provides diversity in the data received, which allows to obtain a gain of ≥ 5 dB compared to the OFDM system with linear/non-linear detector. In addition, the proposed detector has linear complexity, which makes it an attractive solution for the implementation of realtime vehicular systems.