University of kufa

College of Engineering
Department of Electrical Engineering

Fundamental of Communication System

Report Name: - Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing

‫ نسيم كاظم باقر‬: ‫أشراف األستاذ‬

‫ علي عايد عبدالشهيد‬: ‫األسم‬
‫ الثالثة – فصلي‬: ‫المرحلة‬
‫ أتصاالت‬: ‫المادة‬
 INTRODUCTION

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a promising technique for

achieving high data rate and combating multipath fading in wireless communications.
OFDM can be thought of as a hybrid of multi-carrier modulation (MCM) and frequency
shift keying (FSK) modulation. MCM is the principle of transmitting data by dividing the
stream into several parallel bit streams and modulating each of these data streams onto
individual carriers or sub carriers (SCs); FSK modulation is a technique where by data is
transmitted on one carrier from a set of orthogonal carriers in each symbol duration.
OFDM used in applications such as digital television and audio
broadcasting, DSL internet access, wireless networks, power line networks,
and 4G/5G mobile communications.
It was introduced by Robert W. Chang of Bell Labs in 1966. OFDM was improved by
Weinstein and Ebert in 1971 with the introduction of a guard interval, providing better
orthogonality in transmission channels affected by multipath propagation.
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.

1|PA GE
1 - OFDM BASED PHY PERFORMANCE OF IEEE 802.11A USING VARIOUS PRACTICAL CHANNEL MODELS
2 - ORTHOGONAL FREQUENCY-DIVISION MULTIPLEXING(WIKIPEDIA)
 CONCEPTS OF OFDM

System bandwidth is divided into a set of parallel overlapping, yet orthogonal sub-bands
independent to each other. Data is first split into independent streams, which modulate
different sub-carriers, Then are multiplexed to create OFDM signal, OFDM is a special
case of FDM ,Significantly improves spectral efficiency. Avoid the need for steep band
pass filters and avoids the need of a bank of oscillators, since can be implanted digitally.
Figure 1 illustrates the main concepts of an OFDM signal and the inter-relationship
between the frequency and time domains. In the frequency domain, multiple adjacent
tones or subcarriers are each independently modulated with complex data. An Inverse
FFT transform is performed on the frequency-domain subcarriers to produce the OFDM
symbol in the time-domain. Then in the time domain, guard intervals are inserted
between each of the symbols to prevent inter-symbol interference at the receiver caused
by multi-path delay spread in the radio channel. Multiple symbols can be concatenated to
create the final OFDM burst signal. At the receiver an FFT is performed on the OFDM
symbols to recover the original data bits.

Figure 1: Frequency-Time representative of OFDM signal

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1 - CONCEPTS OF ORTHOGONAL FREQUENCY DIVISION MULTIPLEXING (OFDM)
 FDM Vs OFDM

BASIS FOR
FDM OFDM
COMPARISON

Basic Bandwidth dedicated to several All the sub-channels are assigned to a

sources. single data source.

Relationship between the No relationship exists Addition of the number of orthogonal

carriers carriers

Use of Guard band Necessary Not required

Spectral efficiency Low High

Effect of interference Prone to interference. Negligible susceptance to interference.

 In FDM the entire bandwidth is divided by several sources. On the

contrary, in OFDM all the sub channels are dedicated to the single data
source.
 The carriers do not rely on each other in case of FDM while OFDM sums
up the number of orthogonal carriers for the particular point.
 FDM makes use of guard band, whereas OFDM eliminated the use of
guard band.
 The spectral efficiency of OFDM is better than FDM.
 FDM is easily affected by other RF resources, causing it vulnerable to
interference. As against, OFDM is not affected by interference.

Figure 2 FDM signal vs OFDM signal.

3|PAG E
Difference Between FDM and OFDM
 ADVANTAGES & DISADVANTAGES

Summary of advantages
1. OFDM is an efficient way to deal with multipath; for a given delay
spread, the implementation complexity is significantly lower than that
of a single-carrier system with an equalizer.
2. In relatively slow time-varying channels, it is possible to enhance
capacity significantly by adapting the data rate per SC according to
the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of that particular SC.
3. OFDM is robust against narrowband interference because such
interference affects only a small percentage of the SCs.
4. OFDM makes single-frequency networks possible, which is especially
attractive for broadcasting applications. On the other hand, OFDM
also has some drawbacks compared with single carrier modulation.
5. OFDM is more sensitive to frequency offset and phase noise.
6. OFDM has a relatively large peak-to-average-power ratio, which
tends to reduce the power efficiency of the radio frequency (RF)
amplifier
Summary of disadvantages
1. Sensitive to Doppler shift
2. Sensitive to frequency synchronization problems
3. High peak-to-average-power ratio (PAPR), requiring linear
transmitter circuitry, which suffers from poor power efficiency
4. Loss of efficiency caused by cyclic prefix/guard interval.

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1- CHAPTER 2 OFDM: PRINCIPLES AND CHALLENGES
2- ORTHOGONAL FREQUENCY DIVISION MULTIPLEXING AND ITS APPLICATIONS
 APPLICATION OF OFDM IN VARIOUS SYSTEMS

1. In Standard IEEE 802.11a

2. In Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB)
3. In DVB-H: Digital Broadcast Services to Handheld Devices
o DVB-H uses OFDM air interface technology, and includes a technique for
power reduction in the tuner. It uses time slicing so that the tuner can be
switched off most of the time and is only on during short transmission
bursts. This allows the tuner to operate over a reduced input bandwidth
and also conserves power. OFDM is a very good choice for a mobile TV
air interface.
4. Wired version mostly known as Discrete Multi-tone Transmission
(DMT)
o ADSL and VDSL broadband access via POTS copper wiring
o DVB-C2, an enhanced version of the DVB-C digital cable TV
standard
o Power line communication (PLC)
o ITU-T G.hn, a standard which provides high-speed local area
networking of existing home wiring (power lines, phone lines
and coaxial cables)
o TrailBlazer telephone line modems

5|PA GE
1 - ORTHOGONAL FREQUENCY DIVISION MULTIPLEXING AND ITS APPLICATIONS.
2 - CHAPTER 2 OFDM: PRINCIPLES AND CHALLENGES
 OFDM system Implementation using FFF transforms.

The concepts used in the simple analog OFDM implementation can be

extended to the digital domain by using a combination of Fast Fourier
Transform (FFT) and Inverse Fast Fourier Transform (IFFT) digital signal
processing. These transforms are important from the OFDM perspective
because they can be viewed as mapping digitally modulated input data (data
symbols) onto orthogonal subcarriers. In principle, the IFFT takes
frequency-domain input data (complex numbers representing the modulated
subcarriers) and converts it to the time-domain output data (analog OFDM
symbol waveform).
In a digitally implemented OFDM system, the input bits are grouped and
mapped to source data symbols that are a complex number representing the
modulation constellation point (e.g., the BPSK or QAM symbols that would
be present in a single subcarrier system). These complex source symbols are
treated by the transmitter as though they are in the frequency-domain and are
the inputs to an IFFT block that transforms the data into the time-domain.
The IFFT takes in N source symbols at a time where N is the number of
subcarriers in the system. Each of these N input symbols has a symbol
period of T seconds. Recall that the output of the IFFT is N orthogonal
sinusoids. These orthogonal sinusoids each have a different frequency and
the lowest frequency is DC. OFDM system block diagram shown in figure 3
below.

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CONCEPTS OF ORTHOGONAL FREQUENCY DIVISION MULTIPLEXING (OFDM) AND 802.11
WLAN
 Simple 802.11a OFDM Signal Implementation.

An 802.11a OFDM carrier signal (burst type) is the sum of one or more OFDM symbols
each comprised of 52 orthogonal subcarriers, with baseband data on each subcarrier
being independently modulated using quadrature amplitude modulation (available
formats: BPSK, QPSK, 16-QAM, or 64-QAM). This composite baseband signal is used
to modulate a main RF carrier.
To begin the OFDM signal creation process, the input data bit stream is encoded with
convolutional coding and Interleaving. Each data stream is divided into groups of "n" bits
(1 bit -BPSK, 2 bits -QPSK, 4 bits -16QAM, or 6 bits -64QAM) and converted into
complex numbers (I+jQ) representing the mapped constellation point. Note that the bit-
rate will be different depending on the modulation format, a 64-QAM constellation (6
bits at a time) can have a bit rate of 54 Mbps while a QPSK constellation (2 bits at time)
may only be 12 Mbps.
Then 52 bins of the IFFT block are loaded. 48 bins contain the constellation points which
are mapped into frequency offset indexes ranging from -26 to +26, skipping the 4 Pilot
and zero bins. There are 4 Pilot subcarriers inserted into frequency offset index locations
-21, -7, +7, and +21. The zero bin is the Null or DC subcarrier and is not used; it contains
a 0 value (0+j0).

Figure 4- 802.11a OFDM Signal Generation Process

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CONCEPTS OF ORTHOGONAL FREQUENCY DIVISION MULTIPLEXING (OFDM) AND 802.11
WLAN
 Architecture of OFDM.

Transmitter
An OFDM carrier signal is the sum of a number of orthogonal subcarriers,
with baseband data on each subcarrier being independently modulated
commonly using some type of quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) or
phase-shift keying (PSK). This composite baseband signal is typically used
to modulate a main RF carrier.
s[n] is a serial stream of binary digits. By inverse multiplexing, these are
first DE multiplexed into (N) parallel streams, and each one mapped to a
(possibly complex) symbol stream using some modulation constellation
(QAM, PSK, etc.). Note that the constellations may be different, so some
streams may carry a higher bit-rate than others.
An inverse FFT is computed on each set of symbols, giving a set of complex
time-domain samples. These samples are then quadrature-mixed to passband
in the standard way. The real and imaginary components are first converted
to the analogue domain using digital-to-analogue converters (DACs), the
analogue signals are then used to modulate cosine and sine waves at the
carrier frequency, f(s), respectively. These signals are then summed to give
the transmission signal, t(s). As shown in figure 5.

Figure 5- Transmitter CCT in OFDM

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1 - ORTHOGONAL FREQUENCY DIVISION MULTIPLEXING AND ITS APPLICATIONS
2 - ORTHOGONAL FREQUENCY-DIVISION MULTIPLEXING (WIKIPEDIA)
3 - CHAPTER 2 OFDM: PRINCIPLES AND CHALLENGES
 Architecture of OFDM.

Channel
The channel is modeled as a time-domain complex-baseband transfer
function, which may then be convolved with the transmitted signal to
determine the signal at the receiver side. The channel baseband equivalent
impulse response function for the (uth) user, h˜u(t) is defined as

Where hu,l(t) is the complex gain of the lth multipath component for the uth
user at time t. The channel is assumed to be static for the duration of one
OFDM symbol, and the path gain coefficients for each path contribution are
assumed to be uncorrelated. No assumption is made for the autocorrelation
properties of each path, except in the case of frequency hopping systems. In
such systems, the channel is assumed to be completely uncorrelated between
two frequency hops, provided that the distance in frequency is sufficiently
large.

Figure 6- Channel of OFDM

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1 - ORTHOGONAL FREQUENCY DIVISION MULTIPLEXING AND ITS APPLICATIONS
2 - ORTHOGONAL FREQUENCY-DIVISION MULTIPLEXING (WIKIPEDIA)
3 - CHAPTER 2 OFDM: PRINCIPLES AND CHALLENGES
 Architecture of OFDM.

Receiver
The receiver picks up the signal r(t), which is then quadrature-mixed down
to baseband using cosine and sine waves at the carrier frequency. This also
creates signals centered on 2fc, so low-pass filters are used to reject these.
The baseband signals are then sampled and digitized using analog-to-digital
converters (ADCs), and a forward FFT is used to convert back to the
frequency domain.
This returns N parallel streams, each of which is converted to a binary
stream using an appropriate symbol detector. These streams are then re-
combined into a serial stream, which is an estimate of the original binary
stream at the transmitter. Receiver CCT of OFDM is shown below.

Figure 7- Receiver CCT of OFDM

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1 - ORTHOGONAL FREQUENCY DIVISION MULTIPLEXING AND ITS APPLICATIONS
2 - ORTHOGONAL FREQUENCY-DIVISION MULTIPLEXING (WIKIPEDIA)
3 - CHAPTER 2 OFDM: PRINCIPLES AND CHALLENGES
 Mathematical Expression of OFDM Signal.

Consider a set of transmitted carriers as follows:

We now show that every two carriers are orthogonal to each other. Proof
bellow.

In summary:

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1 - INTRODUCTION TO ORTHOGONAL FREQUENCY DIVISION MULTIPLEXING (OFDM)
2 - CHAPTER 2 OFDM: PRINCIPLES AND CHALLENGES
3 - MATHEMATICAL DESCRIPTION OF OFDM
 Mathematical Expression of OFDM Signal.

From above, we know that is the orthogonal signal set. An OFDM

signal based on this orthogonal signal set can be written as:

T: OFDM symbol duration

: transmitted data on the n-th carrier of the k-th symbol

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1-INTRODUCTION TO ORTHOGONAL FREQUENCY DIVISION MULTIPLEXING (OFDM)
2- CHAPTER 2 OFDM: PRINCIPLES AND CHALLENGES
3- MATHEMATICAL DESCRIPTION OF OFDM
 Usage.

OFDM is used in:

 Digital Radio Mondiale DRM
 Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB)
 Digital television DVB-T/T2 (terrestrial), DVB-H (handheld), DMB-
T/H, DVB-C2 (cable)
 Wireless LAN IEEE 802.11a, IEEE 802.11g, IEEE 802.11n, IEEE
802.11ac, and IEEE 802.11ad
 WiMAX
 Li-Fi
 ADSL (G.dmt/ITU G.992.1)
 The LTE and LTE Advanced 4G mobile phone standards
 Modern narrow and broadband power line communications
 Powerline Technology
 Ultra-wideband

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1-ORTHOGONAL FREQUENCY-DIVISION MULTIPLEXING (WIKIPEDIA)
2- CHAPTER 2 OFDM: PRINCIPLES AND CHALLENGES
 OFDM System Design Issues

OFDM System Design Requirements:

OFDM systems depend on four system requirements:
 Available bandwidth: Bandwidth is always the scarce resource, so the
mother of the system design should be the available bandwidth for
operation. The amount of bandwidth will play a significant role in
determining number of subcarriers, because with a large bandwidth, we
can easily fit in a large number of subcarriers with reasonable guard
space.
 Required bit rate: The overall system should be able to support the data
rate required by the users. For example, to support broadband wireless
multimedia communication, the system should operate at more than 10
Mbps at least.
 Tolerable delay spread: Tolerable delay spread will depend on the user
environment. Measurements show that indoor environment experiences
maximum delay spread of few hundreds of ns at most, whereas outdoor
environment can experience up to 10 μs. So the length of CP should be
determined according to the tolerable delay spread.
 Doppler values: Users on a high-speed vehicle will experience higher
Doppler shift, whereas pedestrians will experience smaller Doppler shift.
These considerations must be taken into account.

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1-ORTHOGONAL FREQUENCY-DIVISION MULTIPLEXING (WIKIPEDIA)
2- CHAPTER 2 OFDM: PRINCIPLES AND CHALLENGES
 OFDM System Design Issues

OFDM System Design Parameters:

1- Number of subcarriers: Increasing number of subcarriers will reduce the data
rate via each subcarrier, which will make sure that the relative amount
of dispersion in time caused by multipath delay will be decreased (see
Fig. 8). But when there are large numbers of subcarriers, the
synchronization at the receiver side will be extremely difficult.
2- Guard time (CP interval) and symbol duration: A good ratio
between the CP interval and symbol duration should be found, so that
all multipaths are resolved and not significant amount of energy is lost
due to CP (see Fig. 9). As a thumb rule, the CP interval must be two
to four times larger than the root mean square (RMS) delay spread.
Symbol duration should be much larger than the guard time to
minimize the loss of SNR, but within reasonable amount. It cannot be
arbitrarily large, because larger symbol time means that more
subcarriers can fit within the symbol time. More subcarriers increase
the signal processing load at both the transmitter and receiver,
increasing the cost and complexity of the resulting device.
3- Subcarrier spacing: Subcarrier spacing must be kept at a level so
that synchronization is achievable. This parameter will largely depend
on available bandwidth and the required number of sub channels.
4- Modulation type per subcarrier: This is trivial, because different
modulation schemes will give different performances. Adaptive
modulation and bit loading may be needed depending on the
performance requirement. It is interesting to note that the performance
of OFDM systems with differential modulation compares quite well
with systems using non-differential and coherent demodulation

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1-ORTHOGONAL FREQUENCY-DIVISION MULTIPLEXING (WIKIPEDIA)
2- CHAPTER 2 OFDM: PRINCIPLES AND CHALLENGES
 OFDM System Design Issues

Figure 8- Design of subcarrier spacing in OFDM systems

Figure 9- Design of CP duration in OFDM systems

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1-ORTHOGONAL FREQUENCY-DIVISION MULTIPLEXING (WIKIPEDIA)
2- CHAPTER 2 OFDM: PRINCIPLES AND CHALLENGES
 Conclusion

The idea of multi-carrier transmission has emerged recently to be used for

combating the hostile wireless channel and providing high data rate
communications. OFDM is a special form of multi-carrier transmission
where all the subcarriers are orthogonal, and it promises a high user data rate
transmission capability at a reasonable complexity and precision. Although
OFDM has only recently been gaining interest from telecommunications
industry, it has a long history of existence.
OFDM has promising future in wireless networks and mobile
communications. Growth in number of worldwide customers for wireless
networks and ever-increasing demand for large bandwidth has given birth to
this technology. OFDM is already playing an important role in WLAN and
will be part of MAN too. In coming years, it will surely dominate the
communication industry. Also, Wimax and 802.20 use OFDM-MIMO,
which is emerging as the main technology for future cellular packet data
networks, including 3GPP long-term evolution and 3GPP2 air interface
evolution as well.

17 | P A G E
 References

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Channel Models (http://www.ijsce.org/wp-content/uploads/papers/v1i4/D093071411.pdf)
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division_multiplexing#Efficiency_comparison_between_single_carrier_and_multicarrier)

3- Concepts of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM)

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between-fdm-and-ofdm.html)

5- CHAPTER 2 OFDM: PRINCIPLES AND

CHALLENGES(https://content.schweitzer-
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APPLICATIONS (https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1309/1309.7334.pdf)
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MULTIPLEXING (OFDM) AND 802.11 WLAN (
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ofdm/content/ofdm_basicprinciplesoverview.htm#:~:text=Orthogonal%20Frequency%20Division%
20Multiplexing%20(OFDM)%20is%20a%20digital%20multi%2D,within%20the%20same%20single
%20channel.&text=OFDM%20is%20based%20on%20the,Frequency%20Division%20Multiplexing%
20(FDM). )
8-INTRODUCTION TO ORTHOGONAL FREQUENCY DIVISION
MULTIPLEXING (OFDM)
(http://wits.ice.nsysu.edu.tw/course/pdfdownload/94_2/%E6%96%B0%E4%B8%96%E4%BB%A3%
E7%84%A1%E7%B7%9A%E9%80%9A%E8%A8%8A%E7%B3%BB%E7%B5%B1%E5%9F%BA%E9%A
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%20a%20sampled%20digital,the%20data%20to%20be%20transmitted.)