Performance Comparison of CP-OFDM and OQAM-OFDM Based WiFi Systems

TL;DR

This paper compares CP-OFDM and OQAM-OFDM WiFi systems, analyzing their performance, spectral efficiency, and complexity under multipath conditions, revealing trade-offs between throughput and computational demands.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison of CP-OFDM and OQAM-OFDM schemes for WiFi, highlighting their performance and complexity differences in a unified system evaluation.

Findings

OQAM-OFDM achieves 24% higher spectral efficiency.

Both schemes have similar BER and FER performance.

OQAM-OFDM has up to five times higher computational complexity.

Abstract

In this contribution, a direct comparison of the Offset-QAM-OFDM (OQAM-OFDM) and the Cyclic Prefix OFDM (CP-OFDM) scheme is given for an 802.11a based system. Therefore, the chosen algorithms and choices of design are described and evaluated as a whole system in terms of bit and frame error rate (BER/FER) performance as well as spectral efficiency and complexity in the presence of multipath propagation for different modulation orders. The results show that the OQAM-OFDM scheme exhibits similar BER and FER performance at a 24% higher spectral efficiency and achievable throughput at the cost of an up to five times increased computational complexity.