Multi-segmental OFDM signals equalization with piecewise linear channel model over rapidly time-varying channels

Abstract

For rapidly time-varying channels, the performance of (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) OFDM systems with the conventional one tap equalizer will be significantly degraded. Because the orthogonality between subcarriers is destroyed, the conventional way to combat the inter-carrier interference (ICI) is employing the banded minimum mean square error (MMSE) equalizer, which can save computational efforts introduced by a large number of subcarriers. However, the width of the banded channel matrix is mainly determined by the normalized Doppler frequency in the sense that with the high Doppler frequency the complexity of equalization for one OFDM block will significantly increase with the band width D. In order to reduce the equalization complexity, the authors proposed multi-segmental OFDM signal equalization method with piecewise linear model (PLM) to approximate the time variations and mitigate the corresponding ICI. Its complexity is significantly reduced with the small segments. Furthermore, an alternative MMSE method with the iterative rank-1 matrix updates is proposed to further reduce the complexity. We also derive the theoretical pre-equalized and equalized signal to interference ratio (SIR) for different normalized Doppler frequencies and segment numbers, which implies that the larger segment number can achieve the better performance. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the conventional banded MMSE equalizer and the partial fast Fourier transform (FFT) method in terms of bit error rate (BER) with almost the same complexity.