Reliability and latency trade-off in time domain interleaving for OFDM communication systems

This paper studies the reliability and latency trade-off for time domain interleaving (TDI) in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. TDI provides significant improvement in error performance as well as embedded physical layer security. However, uncareful design of TDI can introduce significant delays by using unnecessarily long interleavers. In this work, the performance of TDI is evaluated in frequency-selective fading channels with low and high mobility. The obtained results show that TDI can substantially enhance the error performance of OFDM systems without an increase in latency. Moreover, for low mobility applications, the interleaver length has no significant effect on the error performance; whereas, for high mobility application, the error performance can be further improved by using longer interleavers at the expense of increased latency.