13.6 ORTHOGONAL FREQUENCY DIVISION MULTIPLEXING
Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a spectrally efficient
modulation technique employed in many military and commercial communications
systems. Some of the commercial applications include IEEE802.11
variants (a, g, n, etc.) adopted for wireless local area networks, IEEE802.16
(Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access or WIMAX), Long Term
Evolution (LTE) for mobile phone communications, and digital audio broadcasting.
By applying data from QAM modulation onto orthogonal, closely
spaced carriers, each with low symbol rate, and appending guard time, high
overall data rate is attained while mitigating intersymbol interference. A
cyclic prefix inserted during the guard interval assists in minimizing the time
dispersion inherent in multipath channels. OFDM is efficiently implemented
using the fast Fourier transform (FFT), which enables the use of frequency
domain equalization, an additional scheme for mitigating multipath. OFDM
is sensitive to Doppler shift and exhibits high peak to average power ratio
requiring transmission to be maintained within the linear range of the power
amplifier.
The Simulink model to be presented here is intended to explore selected
characteristics of OFDM. The model, depicted in Figure 13.58 for an AWGN
channel, is modified from an IEEE 802.11, a Simulink model available on the
MATLAB Central File Exchange.3
Since it is known that OFDM BER performance often corresponds to
16-QAM, a simulation for 16-QAM in AWGN is included in the model for
comparison with the OFDM performance. The scope is used to ensure proper
synchronization between the transmitted and received signals.
Each of the blocks in this model is now discussed further to explain several
essential elements of an OFDM implementation. The source block produces
frame-based, 16-ary random integers with 960 samples/frame as seen
in Figure 13.59.
Selection of the 16-ary rectangular QAM modulator with Gray mapping
and average power normalization is shown in Figure 13.60a; the signal constellation
is displayed in Figure 13.60b.
Figure 13.61 displays the shaping of OFDM symbols, found by looking
under the mask, where it is seen that the 960 samples/frame are converted
into a 48 × 20 array.
To create an efficient FFT size, the Pad block, shown in Figure 13.62,
appends zeroes to increase the column size to 64.