Analysis and Compensation of Carrier Frequency Offset Impairments in Unique Word OFDM

TL;DR

This paper investigates the impact of carrier frequency offset on Unique Word-OFDM, demonstrating its superior robustness over conventional OFDM and evaluating various CFO compensation methods through analysis and simulations.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison of CFO effects on UW-OFDM versus traditional OFDM and assesses multiple compensation techniques with different complexities.

Findings

UW-OFDM shows higher robustness against CFO effects than CP-OFDM.

CFO compensation methods vary in effectiveness and computational complexity.

BER performance of UW-OFDM remains superior across different scenarios.

Abstract

Unique Word-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (UW-OFDM) is known to provide various performance benefits over conventional cyclic prefix (CP) based OFDM. Most important, UW-OFDM features excellent spectral sidelobe suppression properties and an outstanding bit error ratio (BER) performance. Carrier frequency offset (CFO) induced impairments denote a challenging task for OFDM systems of any kind. In this work we investigate the CFO effects on UW-OFDM and compare it to conventional multi-carrier and single-carrier systems. Different CFO compensation approaches with different computational complexity are considered throughout this work and assessed against each other. A mean squared error analysis carried out after data estimation reveals a significant higher robustness of UW-OFDM over CP-OFDM against CFO effects. Additionally, the conducted BER simulations generally support this conclusion for various scenarios, ranging from uncoded to coded transmission in a frequency selective environment.