Multicarrier Chirp-Division Multiplexing for Wireless Communications

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multicarrier chirp-division multiplexing system that uses orthogonal chirp waveforms for wireless communication, demonstrating improved performance over traditional OFDM in simulations and experiments.

Contribution

The paper develops a novel MCDM system utilizing orthogonal chirp waveforms and an OCT, with a low complexity receiver design and comprehensive performance evaluation.

Findings

MCDM achieves lower BER than OFDM in tests.

Orthogonal chirp waveforms are effectively used as subcarriers.

The system supports higher data rates with higher order modulations.

Abstract

We propose a multicarrier chirp-division multiplexing (MCDM) system in which orthogonal chirp waveforms are utilized as frequency subcarriers. Orthogonal characteristics of chirp subcarriers are analyzed in respect to cross-correlation coefficients among subcarriers. Moreover, orthogonal chirp transform (OCT) is developed to implement MCDM systems. In addition, we design a low complexity receiver, including packet synchronization, carrier frequency offset compensation, channel estimation, and symbol detection. Proposed MCDM systems have both advantages of chirp waveforms and multicarrier architectures. Computational complexity of our proposed detector is discussed in detail. The bit-error-rate (BER) performance of the MCDM system is evaluated in simulations and indoor radio frequency (RF) experiments. We have demonstrated effectiveness of MCDM systems both in simulation and experimental results, comparing to orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. Moreover, MCDM can be further applied to higher order modulations for enabling higher data rates for RF wireless communications.