Introduction to OFDM

NAYAN SEN
ROLL : 001310702009 Jadavpur University ETCE Department

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CONTENTS
1) Introduction 2) Basics of OFDM 3) OFDM Spectra and Waveform 4) Multicarrier Modulation and OFDM using IDFT 5) Guard Time and Cyclic Extension 6) OFDM Transmitter and Receiver 7) Advantages of OFDM 8) Disadvantages of OFDM 9) Future Directions 10) References

Introduction
High data rate transmission over mobile or wireless channels is required by many applications. However, the symbol duration reduces with the increase of the data rate, and dispersive fading of the wireless channels will cause more severe inter-symbol interference (ISI) if single-carrier modulation, such as in time-division multiple access (TDMA) or Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), is still used. In order to reduce the effect of ISI, the symbol duration must be much larger than the delay spread of wireless channels. In orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), the entire channel is divided into many narrow-band sub channels, which are transmitted in parallel to maintain high-data-rate transmission and, at the same time, to increase the symbol duration to combat ISI. OFDM is a special form of multicarrier (MC) that dates back to 1960s. The concept of MC transmission was first explicitly proposed by Chang [1] in 1966. MultiCarrier Transmission has a lot of useful properties such as delay-spread tolerance and spectrum efficiency that encourage their use in un-tethered broadband communications. This report is intended to provide a tutorial level introduction to OFDM Modulation, its advantages and demerits, and some applications of OFDM.

Basics of OFDM
OFDM is a special case of multicarrier transmission, where a single data stream is transmitted over a number of lower-rate subcarriers (SCs). It is worth mentioning here that OFDM can be seen as either a modulation technique or a multiplexing technique. One of the main reasons to use OFDM is to increase robustness against frequency-selective fading or narrowband interference. In a single-carrier system, a single fade or interferer can cause the entire link to fail, but in a multicarrier system, only a small percentage of the SCs will be affected. Error-correction coding can then be used to correct for the few erroneous SCs. The concept of using parallel-data transmission and frequency-division multiplexing (FDM) was developed in the mid-1960s [1, 2]. In a classical parallel-data system, the total signal frequency band is divided into N non overlapping frequency sub channels. Each sub channel is modulated with a separate symbol, and then the N sub channels are frequency multiplexed. It seems good to avoid spectral overlap of channels to eliminate interchannel interference. However, this leads to inefficient use of the available spectrum. To cope with the inefficiency, the ideas proposed in the mid1960s were to use parallel data and FDM with overlapping sub channels, in which each, carrying a signalling rate b, is spaced b apart in frequency to avoid the use of high-speed equalization and to combat impulsive noise and multipath distortion, as well as to use the available bandwidth fully.

FIGURE 1: Bandwidth occupancy: (a) conventional multicarrier technique, (b) orthogonal multicarrier modulation technique. By using the overlapping multicarrier modulation technique, we save almost 50% of bandwidth. To realize this technique, however, we need to reduce cross talk between SCs, which means that we want orthogonality between the different modulated carriers. The word orthogonal indicates that there is a precise mathematical relationship between the frequencies of the carriers in the system. In a normal FDM system, many carriers are spaced apart in such a way that the signals can be received using conventional filters and demodulators. In such receivers, guard bands are introduced between the different carriers and in the frequency domain, which results in a lowering of spectrum efficiency. It is possible, however, to arrange the carriers in an OFDM signal so that the sidebands of the individual carriers overlap and the signals are still received without adjacent carrier interference. To do this the carriers must be mathematically orthogonal. The receiver acts as a bank of demodulators, translating each carrier down to dc, with the resulting signal integrated over a symbol period to recover the raw data. If the other carriers all beat down the frequencies that, in the time domain, have a whole number of cycles in the symbol period T, then the integration process results in zero contribution from all of these other carriers. Thus, the carriers are linearly independent (i.e., orthogonal) if the carrier spacing is a multiple of 1/T. It can be shown that the modulation of these orthogonal sub-carriers can be represented as an Inverse Fourier Transform. Alternatively, one may use a DFT operation followed by low-pass filtering to generate the OFDM signal.

OFDM Spectra and Waveform

As already noted, OFDM transmits a large number of narrowband sub channels. The frequency range between carriers is carefully chosen in order to make them orthogonal one another. In fact, the carriers are separated by an interval of 1/T, where T represents the duration of an OFDM symbol. The frequency spectrum of an OFDM transmission is illustrated below:
1/T

FIGURE 2: Spectra of individual sub-carriers Each sinc of the frequency spectrum above corresponds to a sinusoidal carrier modulated by a rectangular waveform representing the information symbol. One could easily notice that the frequency spectrum of one carrier exhibits zero-crossing at central frequencies corresponding to all other carriers. At these frequencies, the intercarrier interference is eliminated, although the individual spectra of subcarriers overlap. As it is well known, orthogonal signals can be separated at the receiver by correlation techniques. The receiver acts as a bank of demodulators, translating each carrier down to baseband, the resulting signal then being integrated over a symbol period to recover the data. If the other carriers all beat down to frequencies which, in the time domain means an integer number of cycles per symbol period (T), then the integration process results in a zero contribution from all these carriers. The waveform of some carriers in an OFDM transmission is illustrated below:

FIGURE 3: Three sub-carriers within an OFDM signal.

Multicarrier modulation and OFDM using IDFT

Let us start with basics of digital modulation. Digital modulation modulates three parameters of a sinusoidal signal.

A, K, fC

Let us take a general signal,

( )

This signal can be decomposed into:

s(t ) cos(2f c t k ) cos k cos(2 f c t ) sin k sin(2 f c t ) ak cos k , bk sin k s(t ) Re[(ak jbk )e j 2fct ]

So now s(t) can be expressed by a complex base band signal:

e j 2fct
(ak jbk )
( Data 00 01 10 11

Indicates carrier sinusoidal

Digital modulation as a complex number

) is plotted on I (real)-Q (imaginary) plane. For example for QPSK: phase /4 3/4 5/4 7/4

Now in a multicarrier system we have the corresponding sub-carrier modulations as: Sub-Carrier 1: Sub-Carrier 2: Sub-Carrier 3: And so on. And the composite signal: ( ) ( )

( )
( )

(
(

)
)

(
(

)
)

( )

The modulation schema for such a technique requires a bank of modulators and local oscillators as illustrated below:

FIGURE 4 : Modulation schema for multicarrier modulation( using bank of modulators)

This technique requires a very large array of sinusoidal generators and also a large array of coherent demodulators to make it work. Therefore, the hardware solution proves impractical. The magic idea is to use FFT ( Fast Fourier Transform) a faster mathematical method of computing DFT(Discrete Fourier Transform). The use of Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) in the parallel transmission of data using Frequency Division Multiplexing was investigated in 1971 by Weinstein and Ebert [3]. The ability to generate and to demodulate the signal using a software implementation of FFT algorithm is the key of OFDM current popularity. In fact, the signal is generated using the Inverse Fast Fourier Transform (IFFT), the fast implementation of Inverse Discrete Fourier Transform (IDFT). Now for an OFDM system, the fundamental frequency is symbol period. OFDM sub carrier frequencies are where
T

where T is the OFDM

Symbol Period

FIGURE 5 : OFDM sub carriers Now let us take a look at IDFT in order to find the mysterious connection between this transform and the concept of multicarrier modulation. According to its mathematical distribution, IDFT summarizes all sine and cosine waves of amplitudes stored in X[k] array, forming a time domain signal: , , , -{ ( ) ( )}

Carefully studying the above relation, we can simply observe that IDFT takes a series of complex exponential carriers, modulate each of them with a different symbol from the information array X[k], and multiplexes all this to generate N samples of a time domain signal. And what is really important, the complex exponential carriers are orthogonal to each other, as we know from the Fourier decomposition. These carriers are frequency spaced with

 = 2 N. If we consider that the N data symbols X[k] come from sampling an analog information with a frequency of fs, an easy to make discrete to analog frequency conversion indicates a f = 1/ T spacing between the subcarriers of the transmitted signal. The N samples of the time domain signal are synthesized from sinusoids and co-sinusoids of frequencies k 2/ N. The weight with which each complex exponential contributes to the time domain signal waveform is given by the modulation symbol X[k]. Therefore, the information X[k] to be transmitted could be regarded as being defined in the frequency domain. In its simplest form, when X[k] stores a binary information (0 and 1), each symbol to the IDFT entry will simply indicate the presence (a 1) or the absence (a 0) of a certain carrier in the composition of the time domain signal. Now let us return to the basic sub-carrier equation:

( )

So now the OFDM baseband signal is:

( )

)+ ----- (1)

Now we have previously seen that the equation (1) can be represented in terms of complex exponential, as follows:

( )

, ( )- where ( )

and

Now sampling N times in period T on the signal x(t) gives:

Thus ( )= IDFT(

FIGURE 6 : Schema of an OFDM modulator using IDFT. To the receiver, the inverse process is realized: the time domain signal constitutes the input to a DFT signal analyser, implemented of course using the FFT algorithm. The FFT

demodulator takes the N time domain transmitted samples and determines the amplitudes and phases of sine and cosine waves forming the received signal.

Guard Time and Cyclic Extension

Since OFDM transmits data in blocks (usually a block is referred to as an OFDM symbol) any type of a non-ideal transmission channel (such as a multipath channel, in mobile communications system, or a classical dispersive channel as in wired transmissions) will spread the OFDM symbol, causing the blocks of signal to interfere one another. This type of interference is called Inter-Block Interference. IBI will eventually lead to ISI, since two adjacent blocks will overlap, causing the distortion of the symbol affected by overlapping. In order to combat this interference, one of the possible approaches was to introduce a silence period between the transmitted frames. Known as guard interval (GI), or this silence period consists in a number of zero samples, added to the front of each symbol. The residual effect of the previous transmitted frame will affect only the zero padding portion (if the channel is considered to be linear). These altered samples are discarded to the receiver, and useful samples, unaffected by the IBI are used in order to demodulate the signal. In the following figure (7.a), in a radio channel if a multipath attenuated replica of the symbols arrive at the receiver with certain delay, if the guard interval (GI) is not present the previous OFDM symbol interferes with the next OFDM symbol giving rise to ISI, but as we see in figure (7.b), with the inclusion of the guard interval at the beginning of the OFDM symbols causes the previous symbol (Symbol 1) to interfere only with the GI of the next symbol (Symbol 2), thus preserving the useful content of the next symbol ( Symbol 2)

FIGURE 7(a) : ISI due to lack of guard interval.

FIGURE 7(b) : Preventing ISI using Guard Interval(GI) However, the zero-padding doesnt seem the ideal solution, because the Guard Interval (GI) will destroy the periodicity of the carriers. This may lead to inter-carrier interference (ICI), since the carriers are no longer orthogonal to each other as we see in figure (8).

FIGURE 8 : ICI due to non- orthogonal nature of sub-carriers caused by zero GI.

Instead of this quiet period we could use a cyclic prefix (CP) at the beginning of each symbol. The cyclic prefix consists of the last L samples of the OFDM symbol that are copied in front of the data block.

FIGURE 9: Forming of the cyclic prefix (CP)

FIGURE 10: Sub-carrier with cyclic prefix(CP)

If CP duration spans more than the channel impulse response or than the multipath delay, the residual contribution from the previous block is entirely absorbed by the cyclic prefix samples that are thrown up to the receiver. The same thing happened if a zero prefix is used, but the CP facilitates the receiver carrier synchronization, since some signals instead of a long silence period are transmitted. Furthermore, using a circular extension maintains the carriers periodicity, which is important in order to simplify the proper reconstruction of the signal using DFT. We observe this effect in figure (11).

FIGURE 11: Cyclic prefix maintains sub-carrier periodicity for DFT implementation.

FIGURE 12: Generation of CP at the transmitter.

Windowing
A rectangular pulse has a very large bandwidth due to the side lobes of its FT being a sinc function. Windowing is a well-known technique to reduce the level of these side lobes and thereby reduce the signal power transmitted out of band. In an OFDM system, the applied window must not influence the signal during its effective period. It must be noted that filtering can also be used as a substitute for windowing, for tailoring the spectrum roll-off. But windowing is preferred to filtering because, it can be carefully controlled. With filtering, one must be careful to avoid rippling effects in the roll-off region of the OFDM symbol. Rippling causes distortions in the OFDM symbol, which directly leads to less-delay spread tolerance.

OFDM Transmitter and Receiver

The method for generating an ODFM symbol is as follows: First, the N input complex symbols are padded with zeros to get Ns symbols that are used to calculate the IFFT. The output of the IFFT is the basic OFDM symbol. Based on the delay spread of the multi-path channel, a specific guard-time must be chosen (say Tg). A number of samples corresponding to this guard time must be taken from the beginning of the OFDM symbol and appended at the end of the symbol. Likewise, the same number of samples must be taken from the end of the OFDM symbol and must be inserted at the beginning. The OFDM symbol must be multiplied with the raised cosine window to remove the power of the out-of-band sub-carriers. The windowed OFDM symbol is then added to the output of the previous OFDM symbol with a delay of Tr, so that there is an overlap region of Tr between each symbol.

FIGURE : OFDM Transmitter and Receiver. The receiver performs the inverse process of the transmitter. One tap equalizer is used to correct channel distortion. The tap coefficients of the filter are calculated based on channel information.

Advantages OF OFDM

OFDM possesses some inherent advantages for Wireless Communications. Multi-path Delay Spread Tolerance As discussed earlier, the increase in the symbol time of the OFDM symbol by N times (N being the number of sub-carriers), leads to a corresponding increase in the effectiveness of OFDM against the ISI caused due to multi-path delay spread. Further, using the cyclic extension process and proper design, one can completely eliminate ISI from the system. Effectiveness against Channel Distortion In addition to delay variations in the channel, the lack of amplitude flatness in the frequency response of the channel also causes ISI in digital communication systems. A typical example would be the twister-pair used in telephone lines. These transmission lines are used to handle voice calls and have a poor frequency response when it comes to high frequency transmission. In systems that use single-carrier transmission, an equalizer might be required to mitigate the effect of channel distortion. The complexity of the equalizer depends upon the severity of the channel distortion and there are usually issues such as equalizer non-linearities and error propagation etc that cause additional trouble. In OFDM systems on the other hand,

since the bandwidth of each sub-carrier is very small, the amplitude response over this narrow bandwidth will be basically flat (of course, one can safely assume that the phase response will be linear over this narrow bandwidth). Even in the case of extreme amplitude distortion, an equalizer of very simple structure will be enough to correct the distortion in each sub-carrier. Throughput Maximization (Transmission at Capacity) The use of sub-carrier modulation improves the flexibility of OFDM to channel fading and distortion makes it possible for the system to transmit at maximum possible capacity using a technique called channel loading. Suppose the transmission channel has a fading notch in a certain frequency range corresponding to a certain sub-carrier. If we can detect the presence of this notch by using channel estimation schemes and assuming that the notch doesnt vary fast enough compared to the symbol duration of the OFDM symbol, it can be possible to change (scale down/up) the modulation and coding schemes for this particular sub-carrier (i.e., increase their robustness against noise), so that capacity as a whole is maximized over all the sub-carriers. However, this requires the data from channel-estimation algorithms. In the case of single-carrier systems, nothing can be done against such fading notches. They must somehow survive the distortion using error correction coding or equalizers. Robustness against Impulse Noise Impulse noise is usually a burst of interference caused usually caused in channels such as the return path HFC (Hybrid-Fiber-Coaxial), twisted-pair and wireless channels affected by atmospheric phenomena such as lightning etc. It is common for the length of the interference waveform to exceed the symbol duration of a typical digital communication system. For example, in a 10 MBPS system, the symbol duration is 0.1ms , and an impulse noise waveform, lasting for a couple of micro-seconds can cause a burst of errors that cannot be corrected using normal error-correction coding. Usually complicated Reed-Solomon codes in conjunction with huge interleaves are used to correct this problem. OFDM systems are inherently robust against impulse noise, since the symbol duration of an OFDM signal is much larger than that of the corresponding single-carrier system and thus, it is less likely that impulse noise might cause (even single) symbol errors. Thus, complicated error-control coding and interleaving schemes for handling burst-type errors are not really required for OFDM Systems simplifying the transceiver design. Frequency Diversity. OFDM is the best place to employ Frequency Diversity. In fact, in a combination of OFDM and CDMA called the MC-CDMA transmission technique , frequency diversity is inherently present in the system. (i.e., it is available for free).

Disadvantages of OFDM

The Peak Power Problem One of the most serious problems with OFDM transmission is that, it exhibits a high peak-toaverage ratio. In other words, there is a problem of extreme amplitude excursions of the transmitted signal. The OFDM signal is basically a sum of N complex random variables, each of which can be considered as a complex modulated signal at different frequencies. In some cases, all the signal components can add up in phase and produce a large output and in some cases, they may cancel each other producing zero output. Thus the peak-to-average ratio (PAR) of the OFDM system is very large. The problem of Peak-To-Average Ratio is more serious in the transmitter. In order to avoid clipping of the transmitted waveform, the poweramplifier at the transmitter frontend must have a wide linear range to include the peaks in the transmitted waveform. Building power amplifiers with such wide linear ranges is a costly affair. Further, this also results in high power consumption. The DACs and the ADCs must also have a wide range to avoid clipping. Cyclic Prefix Overhead A cyclic prefix at least as long as the channel response must be attached to each OFDM symbol to prevent interference between symbols. The cyclic prefix represents a significant overhead and the only way to improve efficiency (reduce the relative overhead) is to increase the number of subcarriers. Frequency Control OFDM relies on orthogonality between the overlapped sub-carriers achieved by frequency control to within one percent of the subcarrier spacing. Frequency offset errors mean that the subcarriers are no longer orthogonal, resulting in intercarrier interference and severe degradation in performance. For example, a total 3.5 MHz bandwidth shared between 512 sub-channels gives a frequency spacing of 6.8 KHz between subcarriers, requiring frequency accuracy better than 68 Hz. For this reason, OFDM systems are very sensitive to both frequency offsets and phase noise, and require costly, high specification radio components. The larger the number of subcarriers, the closer the frequency spacing, and so frequency accuracy becomes more and more critical. In Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) systems, vehicles moving through the beam induce sporadic Doppler shifts, resulting in additional frequency offset.

Requirement for coded or adaptive OFDM A null in the frequency response of the channel results in one or more subcarriers having a very low SNR, and these subcarriers will dominate the overall error rate. For this reason, OFDM without either power/rate adaptation, or coding, gives worse performance than single

carrier (SC) modulation. The full potential of OFDM can only be achieved if power and bit rate are optimal for each individual subcarrier for each individual receiver. This is not possible for broadcast transmission on the downlink. Latency and block based processing Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) processing for OFDM is performed on blocks. If the number of subcarriers is increased, the FFT block size is also increased. Block-based processing imposes a minimum block size for each transmitted packet, resulting in delays and loss of efficiency for very small data bursts. The latency of OFDM is high because the smallest burst that can be sent is a full OFDM block. Contrary SC transmission is very efficient, because the block length can be reduced to fit the data payload. Synchronization Synchronization for OFDM transmission is more difficult, and typically requires reception of several OFDM symbols, each having a number of subcarriers dedicated for pilot tones. This is feasible for broadcast OFDM (such as HDTV), where the receiver has plenty of time to acquire synchronization. However, for short burst, point-to-multipoint transmission (especially on the uplink), there is little time to acquire synchronization, and so complicated synchronization schemes are necessary.

Future Directions Unending appetite to achieve capacity, high data rate, minimum bit error rate (BER), spectral efficiency and minimum power requirements are the main driving forces behind future research efforts in OFDM. Various approaches to cope up with the drawbacks produce infinite possibilities for future research. Few of them are given here Channel estimation with diversity techniques and/or coding to compensate the effect(s) of channel with delay/Doppler shifts and try to achieve optimum values of capacity, BER etc. Appropriate combination of waveform shaping and frame overlap in time limited OFDM without destroying orthogonality. Dynamic selection of phase shifts, data sequences and signal clipping or either of the combination of those to reduce PAR Design of channel estimator with time/frequency correlations with adaptation. Adaptive subcarrier, bit, and power allocation to each sub band to achieve optimum values of capacity, BER, minimum power requirement etc. Any other combined approaches like OFDM-CDMA, OFDM-SDMA. Blind estimation techniques for symbol timing and carrier frequency offset. OFDM application specific DSP architectures.

And last but not least, efforts to make it user-centred technology for improvement of quality of life of the individual.

References
[1] R. W. Chang, Synthesis of band-limited orthogonal signals for multichannel data transmission, Bell Syst. Tech. J., vol. 45, pp. 17751797, Dec. 1966. [2] Salzberg, B. R., Performance of an Efficient Parallel Data Transmission System, IEEE Trans. Communications, Vol. COM-15, December 1967, pp. 805813. [3] Weinstein. S.B, Ebert P.M. Data Transmission by Frequency Division Multiplexing using the Discrete Fourier Transform, IEEE Transactions on Communications, VolCOM-19, pp. 628-634, Oct, 1971. [4] https://www.cresis.ku.edu/~rvc/documents/862/862_ofdmreport.pdf [5] www.ratnu.tripod.com/ratna_ofdm.pdf [6] Richard van Nee and Ramjee Prasad, OFDM wireless multimedia communication, Artech House Boston, London, 2000. [7] https://www.bwrcs.eecs.berkeley.edu/Classes/EE225C/Lectures/Lec16_ofdm.pdf [8] www.ctie.monash.edu.au/ofdm/sample_files/armstrong_ofdm.pdf [9] etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-0411103-120728/.../Xiao_thesis.pdf [10] The History of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing Nick LaSorte, W, Justin Barnes, Hazem H. Refai, Univ. of Oklahoma-Tulsa, Tulsa. [11] An Introduction to Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing, Marius Oltean, Universitatea Politehnica Timisoara.