Globecom 2012 - Wireless Communications Symposium

Reliable OFDM System Design under Hostile

Multi-tone Jamming
Mai Abdelhakim
Jian Ren
Tongtong Li
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA.
Email: {abdelhak, renjian, tongli}@egr.msu.edu
AbstractAlong with the advent of reconfigurable radios,
hostile jamming is no longer limited to military applications, but
has become a serious threat for civilian wireless communications,
where OFDM has been identified as one of the most efficient
transmission technologies. In this paper, we consider reliable
transmission of OFDM systems under multi-tone jamming. We
propose to enhance the jamming resistance of OFDM through
symbol level precoding. Our approach is to find the optimal
precoder and decoder that can minimize the MSE between
the transmitted and the estimated symbols, subject to a given
transmit power constraint. Closed-form solutions are derived,
and further demonstrated through simulation examples. It is
observed that adding controlled redundancy at symbol level is
an effective way to mitigate hostile jamming in OFDM systems.
Index TermsHostile jamming, Physical layer security, Precoding, OFDM.

I. I NTRODUCTION
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is an
effective way of transmission over wireless fading channels.
OFDM is adopted by most recent wireless standards (such as
4G LTE and WiMAX) due to its robustness to multipath fading
environment and simple transceiver design [1]. It ensures high
data rate transmission over frequency selective channels, due
to its high spectral efficiency.
If the channel information is available at the transmitter,
further improvement in the spectral efficiency can be obtained
through precoding [2]. A precoder processes the data at the
transmitter before the multicarrier modulation takes place [3].
Conventional precoders generally reshape the spectrum such
that the best power allocation over the orthogonal channels is
achieved. Different criteria are used to design the precoder,
including maximizing capacity [4], [5], maximizing signal to
noise ratio (SNR) [6], minimizing error rates [3] minimizing
mean square errors [5], [7], [8] and minimizing interference
[9], [10] criteria.
In [7], a precoder design for a single carrier - single
input single output (SISO) system using nonmaximally decimated multirate filter bank is introduced. Precoding has been
extensively studied in fading evironment for Multiple-Input
Multiple-output (MIMO) systems [2], [5], [6] and MIMOOFDM systems [3], [11]. However, most of the present precoder design methodologies in the literature, ignore possible
existence of jamming. Hostile jamming signals are radio
frequency signals that are sent intentionally to disrupt legitimate wireless transmissions. It would severely degrade the

978-1-4673-0921-9/12/$31.00 2012 IEEE

performance and lower the spectral efficiency. Therefore, jamming represents a serious threat to the reliability of wireless
communications.
In this paper, we consider precoder design for OFDM
systems under multi-tone jamming [12]. In the multi-tone
jamming model, some subcarriers are affected by a strong
jamming (interfering) signal. Our approach is to find the optimal precoder and the corresponding decoder that minimize the
mean square error (MSE) between the transmitted and the estimated symbols, subject to the total transmit power constraint.
We derive a closed-form expression for the precoder and
the decoder under multi-tone jamming. The performance of
the proposed design is demonstrated using several simulation
examples. It is observed that adding controlled redundancy at
symbol level through precoding is an effective way to mitigate
hostile jamming interference. Several settings are examined
and it is shown that the precoder setting has a significant
impact on the overall system performance.
This paper is organized as follows: the system model and
the problem formulation are presented in II. The joint precoder
and decoder design under multi-tone jamming is provided in
section III. The performance evaluation is provided in section
IV. Finally, the paper is concluded in section V.
II. P ROBLEM F ORMULATION
We consider OFDM system model equipped with transmit
precoder as shown in Figure 1. In our model, the input bits
is first mapped to QAM symbols. Let represents the QPSK
constellation and X = [x1 , x2 , ..., xK ]T is the data vector after
QAM mapping, where xi , K is the length of the input
symbol vector, and (.)T denotes the transpose of the vector. We
assume that the elements of X are independent and identically
distributed, with symbol power S2 . After QAM mapping, the
symbol level precoder is applied.
The Nc K precoder matrix is denoted by P . That is:

p11 p12 . . . p1K

p21 p22 . . . p2K

.
.
. . .
.

.
P =
.
. . .
.
.

.
.
. . .
.
pN c 1
.
. . . pN c K

where Nc is the number of subcarriers used for data symbols

transmission. To allow some redundancy, we choose K Nc .

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Data
bits

QAM
mapping

^
Recovered
X
bits
QAM demap

Decoder
(D)

Precoding
(P)

IFFT

FFT

h0
h1

h2

h3

.
H=
hl

.
0

(1)

(2)

where F is the Nc Nc IFFT orthonormal matrix, with

[F ]n,k = ej2nk/Nc / Nc . Cyclic prefix insertion is followed,
in which a guard band (GB) is added and Nc + GB length
signal is transmitted over the channel.
We model the multipath propagation channel as an FIR
filter with l taps, denoted by (ho , h1 , ..hl1 ). AWGN noise
and multi-tone jamming are interfered with the transmitted
signal as shown in Figure 1. The AWGN noise vector n

2
has zero mean and covariance matrix E(
nH n
) = N
I.
The frequency representation of n
is denoted by N , then
N = F Hn
. It is noted that, since F H is a unitary matrix,
then N is also a Gaussian random vector with zero mean and
2
E(N H N ) = N
I. Let the jamming signal be j and denote
its frequency domain representation as J, then J = F H j.
We assume time invariant multi-tone random jamming
model [12], where some of the subcarriers/tones are jammed.
The jamming location can be detected at the receiver using
pilot signals. We define the vector Nj = [Nj1 , Nj2 , ...NjNc ]
such that Nji = i if subcarrier i is jammed, and equals to
zero elsewhere. The covariance matrix of the jamming signal
where I = diag({(i Nji )}Nc ).
is E(J H J) = J2 I,
i=1
At the receiver side, first, the cyclic prefix is removed. We
assume that the cyclic prefix length is greater than the channel
length l. FFT is then applied obtaining:
Y = F H HV + N + J,

~
n

~
j

removeCP

Multicarrier modulation is applied to the precoded symbol

vector through Inverse Fourier Transform (IFFT), resulting in:
V = F U,

System model.

The precoder is applied to the modulated symbol vector X,

resulting in an Nc 1 vector U , such that:
U = P X.

Fig. 1.

CP
insert

(3)

where H is an Nc Nc circulant channel matrix [13] and the

first column of H is (h0 , h1 , h2 , ..., hl1 , 0, ..., 0)T . Hence, H
is given by:

0
h0
h1
h2
h3
.
hl
0
.
0

0
0
h0
h1
h2
h3
.
hl
0
0

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
.

.
. N

c Nc

The K Nc decoder matrix D is then applied to Y to

recover the transmitted symbols. Hence, the estimated vector
is expressed as:
(X)

=
=

DF H HV + DN + DJ
+ DN + DJ,
DHU

(4)

= F H HF and (.)H denotes the Hermitian of a

where H
matrix. Since H is circulant, then it can be diagonalized by
is a diagonal matrix.
the FFT matrix. Therefore, H
The basic idea of precoding is to optimally exploit the channel information at the transmitter to assign symbols, or their
linear combination, over different subcarriers. The precoder
can also be regarded as symbol level coding. If K < Nc ,
then the precoder provides redundancy on the symbol level
that could be more effective than bit level channel coding.
This is because the jamming occurs with the individual QAM
symbols/subcarriers. If the number of jammed subcarriers is
Njam , then Njam log2 || bits in each OFDM symbol will be
affected by the jamming. Then, if bit level channel coding
with hamming distance dmin is used, in order to be able to
correct the errors
caused
by the jamming, Njam log2 || should
1
be less than dmin
. This is assuming that the codeword
2
spans a single OFDM symbol. Hence, bit level channel coding
may fall short in correcting the erroneous bits caused by the
jamming, and accordingly the bit error rate will be high and
the spectral efficiency will be lowered. Therefore, the use

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of symbol level coding or precoding is essential to combat

the distortion caused by noise and hostile jamming. In the
following section, we will derive a closed-form solution for
the optimal precoding and decoding matrices that result in the
minimum mean square error between the transmitted and the
estimated symbols in the presence of multi-tone jamming.
III. MMSE P RECODING UNDER M ULTI - TONE JAMMING
In this section, we derive the precoder and the decoder
matrices using the Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE)
criterion. The mean square error between the transmitted
is given by:
symbol vector X and the received vector X

H ,
M SE = tr E (X X)(X
X)
(5)

where tr(.) is the trace operation. By substituting with X

given in (4), we get:

XX H P H H
H DH + XX H
M SE = tr E DHP
+DN N H DH + DJJ H DH

XX H XX H P H HD
H
DHP

(6)

Assuming that the channel matrix is perfectly estimated as the

receiver, the randomness comes from the transmitted vector X,
the noise vector N and the jamming vector J. By taking the
expected value of the MSE we get:

2
P HH
H DH + S2 I + N
M SE = tr S2 DHP
DDH

H 2 DHP
2 P H HD
H . (7)
+J2 DID
S
S

Our problem is to find D and P such that the mean square

error is minimized and the predefined power constraint is met.
It is required that the total transmit power introduced by the
precoder be less than a predefined value . Then, the problem
can be formulated as follows:

min M SEP,D (X, X);

P,D

s.t. tr P P H = ,

(8)

In the following subsections we will the derive closed-form

expressions for D and P that solve our problem.

obtained using the orthogonality principle, as follows:

H .
M SEo = tr E (X X)X

Using (4), the above expression becomes:

X + DN + DJ) X H
M SEo = tr E X (DHP

= S2 tr I DHP
.
(12)

From the properties of matrices, for any n m matrix A and

m n matrix B, tr(AB) = tr(BA) . If D corresponds to A
corresponds to B, then equation (12) can be written
and HP
as:

D (Nc K) .
M SEo = S2 tr I HP
(13)

The term Nc K is to compensate for the trace of the unity

matrix that was of size K K in equation (12) to the trace
of the Nc Nc unity matrix in (13).
In order to get the optimal precoder P , it is required to get
a simplified M SE expression that is function of P only. This
can be obtained by using the optimal decoder obtained in (10)
and the MMSE expression in (13). If we multiply both sides
, we get:
of (10) by HP

1
2
2
D = HP
P HH
H HP
P HH
H + N I + J I
HP
.
S2
S2
(14)
It follows that:

2
N
J2
H H

P HH
H , (15)
HP D HP P H + 2 I + 2 I = HP
S
S
D)HP
P HH
H = HP
D
(I HP
and
D = HP
D
I HP

(10)

A simplified expression for the minimum MSE can be

2
N
J2
I+ 2I ,
S2
S

(16)

1
2
N
J2
H H
I
+
I
HP
P
H
. (17)
S2
S2

where

1
D = I + HP
P HH
H IX
I HP
,
IX =

2
P HH
H D H + N
H S2 HP
= 0. (9)
S2 HP
DH + J2 ID

Hence, the decoding matrix is given by:

1
2
2
H HP
P HH
H + N I + J I
.
D = P HH
S2
S2

Finally, substituting by (10) in the left hand side of equation

(17), after some mathematical manipulation, we can get:

A. MMSE Decoder Design under Multi-tone Jamming

The MMSE decoder is obtained by differentiating the MSE
with respect to D and setting the result to zero. We get the
following:

(11)

(18)

1
2
N
J2
I+ 2I
.
S2
S

Using this result in (13), the MSE expression can be expressed

as follows:

1
2
H H

M SEo = S tr I + HP P H IX
(Nc K) .

(19)
Following the Cayley-Hamilton theorem [14], it can be proved
that:

tr (I + AB)1 = tr (I + BA)1 ,
(20)
for any two square matrices A and B. The proof is provided

4292

in the appendix. Using (32), the MMSE expression becomes:

1
2
H H

M SEo = S tr I + P P H IX H
(Nc K) .

(21)
H IX H
is a diagonal matrix. Let =
It is noted that H
H IX H,
hence:
H

2
2

= diag h
SJN
R
,
...,
h
SJN
R

11
1
Nc Nc
Nc , (22)

ii and SJN Ri are the ith diagonal element of H

where h
th
and the Signal to Jamming and Noise Ratio of i subcarrier,
respectively. SJN Ri is defined as:
SJN Ri =

s2
.
2
2
N + J (i Nji )

Let Q = P P H , then the MSE can be expressed as:

1
M SEo = S2 tr (I + Q) (Nc K) .

(23)

(24)

The simplified expression for the MSE facilitates the design

of the optimal precoding. In the next subsection, we discuss
the optimal precoder design.
B. MMSE Precoder Design under Multi-tone Jamming
We jointly optimize the precoder and the decoder by further
minimizing the M SE in (24) with respect to P , while considering the transmit power constraint. Lagrange multipliers is
used to solve this constraint minimization problem. We define:
F = tr (I + Q)
By setting

F
Q

+ (tr(Q)) .

(25)

= 0, we get:
Q=

1/2

I
,
1/2

(26)

where is the Lagrange multiplier. It is clear from (26) that Q

is a diagonal matrix. It is also noted that since Q = P P H , then
Q has the same rank as P . Hence, rank(Q) = K. Then, only
K diagonal elements in Q are nonzero and Nc K diagonal
elements are zeros. The physical meaning is to select the good
channels with higher SJN R for transmission. We define:
2

i = h
ii SJN Ri .
Therefore, the nonzero diagonal elements in Q correspond to
the subcarriers with largest i for i = 1, 2, ..., Nc . Without loss
of generality, we assume that the i s are sorted in descending
order. Then, the ith diagonal element in Q, denoted by qii , is
equal to:

1
i

1
, i = 1, 2, .., K;
max 0,
i

qii =
(27)

0, i > K.

This means that if Nc K subcarriers are jammed, then these

subcarriers would not be used for transmission. If more than

Nc K carriers are jammed, then depending on the SJN R,

the jammed subcarriers with highest SJN R may be utilized.
Equivalently, the optimal precoding matrix P is a diagonal
matrix with the ith diagonal element given by:

pii = qii for i = 1, 2, .., K

(28)
and pij = 0 for all i = j. From the power constraints,
K
i=1 qii = , we can obtain the lagrange multiplier . It
can be shown that:

2
=

K
1
i=1 i
K
+ i=1 1i

(29)

In analogy to the waterfilling algorithm, we proved that under

multi-tone jamming, the power allocation over the subcarriers
depends on the SJN R, such that good channels with higher
SJN R are assigned to higher power levels. Also, allowing
some redundancy at the symbol level through precoding, by
setting K < Nc , will further improve the system performance,
as will be illustrated in section IV.
C. Jamming Detection
In this paper, we consider multi-tone stationary jamming
model. Since, the jamming is stationary, we assume it is
invariant within the OFDM symbol duration. The jamming
locations can be detected through training symbols or pilot
signals.
A threshold based detection approach can be employed to
obtain the jamming locations. In this approach, the power
in each subcarrier is calculated at the receiver. Let R be
the Nc 1 received vector. The power in each subcarrier,
EN = [e1 , e2 , .., eNc ]t , is calculated as follows:
EN = diag(E(RRH )),

(30)

where diag(.) corresponds to the diagonal elements in the

matrix. Then,
2
2
S + N
jamming absent
ei =
(31)
2
2
S + N + J2 jamming present

for all i = 1, 2, .., Nc . Therefore, ei is compared to the

threshold . If ei > then the jamming exists at subcarrier
i. Otherwise, no jamming is present at the corresponding
2
subcarrier. = S2 + N
+ , where is introduced to
compensate the perturbation in the noise power. should be
chosen to balance the miss detection and the false alarm rates
of the jamming detection.
IV. S IMULATION R ESULTS
In this section, we illustrate the performance of the proposed
precoding scheme for the uncoded OFDM system under multitone jamming. Rayleigh channel model is used with l = 24
taps. Stationary multi-tone random jamming is considered,
where we denote the Signal to Jamming Power Radio as
SJR and it is defined as SJR = S2 /J2 . The jammed tones
are assumed to be perfectly detected at the receiver through
training symbols. QPSK mapping is used and the QPSK

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10

BER

10

10

10

with precoding, SJR=5dB

without precoding, SJR=5dB
with precoding, SJR=5dB
without precoding, SJR=5dB

10

10
11
SNR (dB)

12

13

14

15

Fig. 3.
Example 2: BER vs SNR with and without precoding, K =
200, Njam = 56.

10

with precoding, SJR=5dB

without precoding, SJR=5dB

10

BER

symbol power is S2 = 1. The maximum power per OFDM

symbol is 1. Therefore, we set = Nc . We also use Nc = 256.
We evaluate the performance in the following scenarios:
Example 1: In this example K = Nc , which means that P
and D are square matrices and no redundancy is introduced
by the precoder. We set Njam = 56 and the SJR = 5dB. In
Figure 2, it can be shown that the precoder results in significant
gains in the BER compared to the case when no precoding is
employed. It is worth mentioning that, when no precoding is
utilized, we assume that the power is uniformly distributed
over the subcarriers and matched filter (to the channel matrix)
is used for decoding.
Example 2: In this example K < Nc , which means that
the precoder introduce some redundancy. We assume K = 200
and Njam = 56 tones. In Figure 3, we compare the BER of the
OFDM system with and without precoding when SJR is equal
to 5dB and 5dB. It can be shown that the precoder improves
the performance by several orders of magnitude. This can be
explained as follows: since K = 200, then the precoder can
avoid transmission over the jammed subcarriers.
Comparing with Figure 2, it is clear that the precoder with
K < Nc significantly outperforms the case when K = Nc
although optimal precoding/power allocation is used in both. It
can be concluded that, in the presence of jamming, redundancy
introduced by precoding improves the system performance.
Example 3: In this example, we consider Njam > Nc
K. We set K = 200 and Njam = 100. In both cases, with
precoding and without precoding, some information are sent
over jammed tones. The BER is shown in Figure 4, where we
consider SJR = 5dB. It is shown from the figure that both
curves saturate at higher BER values compared to the previous
case when Njam was less. However, it is also clear that the
precoder improves the performance significantly.

10

10
0

10

BER

without precoding SJR=5dB

with precoding, K=Nc, SJR=5dB

10

15
SNR (dB)

20

25

Fig. 4.
Example 3: BER vs SNR with and without precoding, K =
200, Njam = 100.

V. C ONCLUSIONS
1

10

10

10
11
SNR (dB)

12

13

14

15

Fig. 2.
Example 1: BER vs SNR with and without precoding, K =
Nc , Njam = 56.

In this paper, we derive the optimal precoder and decoder for

OFDM systems under stationary multi-tone jamming, where
some subcarriers are affected by strong jamming intereference.
The precoder and decoder are jointly optimized to minimize
the mean square error between the transmitted and estimated
symbols, subject to a total transmit power constraint. Closedform expressions are obtained. It is shown that jamming
severely degrades the performance and precoding helps in
compensating for the encountered performance losses. It can
be concluded that redundancy introduced at the symbol level
through precoding is very effective in combating hostile jamming. Further research will be conducted on the precoder
design under more general jamming models.

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Appendix
If A and B are two square matrices of order n, then:

tr (I + AB)1 = tr (I + BA)1 .

(32)

Proof: Since det(rI AB) = det(rI BA), where r is

a scaler number. Then, if we let r = 1, we get:
det [I (I + AB)] = det [I (I + BA)] .

(33)

Equation (33) shows that the matrices (I + AB) and (I + BA)

have the same characteristic polynomial. Let X = I + AB,
Y = I + BA and denote the polynomial coefficients of X and
Y as {qo , q1 , ...qn1 }.
Recall the Cayley-Hamilton theorem [14] that states that any
square matrix satisfies its characteristic equation. By applying
Cayley-Hamilton theorem on X, we get:
X n + qn1 X n1 + ... + q0 I = 0.

(34)

It is clear that X can be represented by a polynomial p(X)

of order n 1. That is, using equation (34), we obtain the
following:

1 n1
X 1 =
X
+ qn1 X n2 + ... + q0 I .
(35)
q0
1

By substituting X with I + AB, we get:

1
(I + AB)1 =
(I + AB)n1 + qn1 (I + AB)n2
q0
+... + q0 I]
(36)

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Hence,

tr (I + AB)1 = tr [p(AB)] .

Similarly, Y 1 can be expressed as follows:

1 n1
Y 1 =
Y
+ qn1 Y n2 + ... + q0 I .
q0
Therefore, we can also obtain the following:

tr (I + BA)1 = tr [p(BA)] .

(37)

(38)

(39)

Since tr [(AB)m ] = tr [(BA)m ] for any positive integer m,

then from equations (37) and (39) we conclude that:

tr (I + AB)1 = tr (I + BA)1 .
(40)
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