AbstractOrthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing

(OFDM) technology is used by high data-rate wireless

communication systems such as Digital Audio Broadcasting
(DAB), Terrestrial Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB-T) and
Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). One of the biggest
advantages that OFDM offers is that it converts a dispersive
broadband channel into parallel narrowband sub-channels,
thus significantly simplifying equalization at the receiver side.
Another intrinsic feature of OFDM is its flexibility in allocating
power optimally among narrowband sub-carriers; this ability
is particularly important for broadband wireless systems
where multipath is eminent. In coding theory, concatenated
codes form a class of error-correcting codes that are derived by
combining an inner code with an outer code. This is a solution
to the problem of finding a code that has both exponentially
decreasing error probability with increasing block length and
polynomial-time decoding complexity. The work presented in
this paper, provides link level performance analysis of non-line
of sight (NLOS) QPSK-OFDM data transmission over
Rayleigh fading channels. Two scenarios have been considered
in this paper. Firstly, the performance of un-coded and coded
1024-point OFDM over the AWGN channel was obtained.
Secondly, using Jakes sum of sinusoids model, the link level
performance of the system was obtained over the COST 207
Rayleigh fading channels (Typical Urban and Bad Urban) and
the Winner vehicular NLOS (RS-MS-NLOS) channel.

I. INTRODUCTION
he principles of orthogonal frequency division
multiplexing (OFDM) modulation have been in
existence for over forty years but the concept has only
become popular in the last decade. The first proposal for
OFDM was made in the early 1950s and during the 1960s
its theory was fully developed. Since then it has received
tremendous attention from researchers and today, OFDM is
a household name in the field of communication.

The salient features of OFDM [1,2], have unsurprisingly
made it the preferred modulation scheme for high data rate
transmission schemes such as wireless LANs, WiMAX and
LTE [3,4]. Its ability to mitigate multipath makes it suitable
for outdoor mobile communications. OFDM has received
great acclaim because of its advantageous features; these
features however come along with some costs such as high
Peak to Average Power Ratio (PAPR)[5]and inter carrier
interference due to frequency offset issues [6, 7]. In OFDM
systems instead of transmitting a single high-rate data
stream, we transmit the data on several narrow-band sub-
channels (with a different carrier corresponding to each sub-
channel), so that each subcarrier experiences relatively flat
fading. Thus, for a given overall data rate, increasing the
number of subcarriers reduces the data rate that each
individual carrier must convey, therefore lengthening the
symbol duration on each subcarrier. To effectively eliminate
ISI due to multipath fading, OFDM uses the concept of a
cyclic prefix. This extends the symbol duration significantly
so that it becomes far greater than the delay spread of the
channel.

Use of channel coding schemes significantly improves the
performance of un-coded OFDM systems. The concatenated
coding scheme originally proposed by Forney [8], is an error
correcting coding scheme in which two different error
correcting codes called the inner code and outer code are
concatenated, achieving comparatively high coding gain by
using codes that are relatively easy to decode. The main
advantage of concatenated coding is that it can provide large
coding gain with less implementation complexity. The
concatenated coding scheme using the convolutional coding
with Viterbi decoding for the inner code, and the Reed-
Solomon (RS) code for the outer code is a special case of
the general concatenated coding scheme proposed by
Forney.

The simulation results presented in this paper demonstrate
the advantage of systems with error control coding over un-
coded system performances in terms of the coding gain.
Section II is an outline of the OFDM system model. The
parameters assumed for various simulations are provided in
section III and the bit error rate performance of various
coded OFDM schemes over fading channels are provided in
section IV. Finally Section V concludes the paper.

II. OFDM SYSTEM MODEL
OFDM represents a different system design approach. It can
be thought of as a combination of modulation and multiple-
access schemes that segments a communications channel in
such a way that many users can share it. OFDM can be
viewed as a form of frequency division multiplexing where
each tone is orthogonal with every other tone. OFDM allows
Coded QPSK-OFDM for Data Transmission
over Fading Channels
Dushantha N. K. Jayakody, Leonardo O. Iheme, Erhan A. nce
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Eastern Mediterranean University, TRNC, via Mersin 10, Turkey.
Email: jayakody.nalin@cc.emu.edu.tr, leonardo.iheme@cc.emu.edu.tr, erhan.ince@emu.edu.tr
Telephone: (0090) 392-630-2778, Fax: (+90) (392) 3650240

T

the spectrum of each tone to overlap, and because they are
orthogonal, they do not interfere with each other. By
allowing the tones to overlap, the overall amount of
spectrum required is reduced. The orthogonality of the
subcarriers also allows efficient modulator and demodulator
implementation using the FFT algorithm on the receiver
side, and IFFT on the transmitter side [9]. In order to totally
get rid of ISI, OFDM employs the use of a cyclic prefix
which increases the length of the symbol period so that it is
much greater than the delay spread of the channel. Fig 1
below shows the block diagram of an OFDM system.



Fig 1: Baseband OFDM System Block Diagram
A way to improve the system performance is to pass the
input sequence through a forward error correction (FEC)
encoder [10, 11]. FEC improves the small scale link
performance by adding redundant bits in the transmitted
message so that if an instantaneous fade occurs in the
channel, the data may still be recovered at the receiver. The
coded signal is then sent to the constellation mapper where
the bits are mapped to a subcarrier amplitude and phase,
which is represented by a complex in-phase and quadrature
(IQ) format.

The IFFT and the FFT are used for modulating and then
demodulating the constellation mapped data onto the
orthogonal sub carriers. The IFFT generally takes N symbols
at a time where N represents the number of subcarriers in the
system. Since the basis functions for an IFFT are N
orthogonal sinusoids, each input symbol would act as a
complex weight for the corresponding functions and the
output will be a summation of all.


When a convolutional block code is assumed as the channel
encoder then at the receiver a Viterbi decoder is needed to
do the decoding. For the concatenated coding schemes, a
Reed Solomon encoder and Reed Solomon decoder pair are
used as the outer coding and decoding schemes while the
convolutional encoder and Viterbi decoder are used as the
inner coding and decoding schemes.
III. SIMULATED OFDM SPECIFICATION
For obtaining the bit error rate performance over additive
and multipath fading channels the parameters depicted in
Table I have been assumed for modulation, channel coding
and FFT size.

Table I: OFDM simulation parameters
FFT Size 1024
Constellation Mapping QPSK
Symbol duration 102.4s
Length of Cyclic Prefix 1/8 of Symbol duration (12.8s)
Channel Coding

R = CC with0
1
= 171
0C1
,
0
2
= 1SS
0C1
,
constraint length of K= 7
Viterbi Decoding with a trace back
length of 35

RS(11,15,4)
Channels COST 207 Rayleigh fading
(Typical Urban and Band Urban)
Winner vehicular NLOS (RS-MS-
NLOS) channel.


For the COST 207 TU/BU channels 12-paths and for the
Winner vehicular NLOS model 20-paths have been
considered.

Since in mobile wireless access the location of the end user
changes and different users may be moving at different
speeds, in this work performance was obtained for Doppler
shifts of 100, 400 and 833 Hz (30km/hr, 120 km/hr, 250
km/hr). It was observed that the Doppler shifts due to
relative motion degraded the performance and also caused
an error floor in multipath fading channels.

IV. SIMULATION RESULTS
This section sets out to show the link-level BER
performance of un-coded and coded QPSK-OFDM over
AWGN and multipath Rayleigh fading channels. For
channel coding, a rate R = convolutional code and a
concatenated code scheme of Reed Solomon/Convolutional
code has been assumed.

A. Un-coded Versus Coded QPSK-OFDM
The link level BER performance for the un-coded QPSK-
OFDM system over the AWGN channel is depicted in Fig.
2. The theoretical BER for QPSK is as in eq. (1)

BER = u.S crcE
b
N
o

(1)

The observed SNR loss of approximately 0.5 dB in the
simulated BER curve is as a result of the cyclic prefix
introduced by OFDM. As stated in [1], the SNR loss can be
calculated as:

SNR
Ioss
= -1u (1 -
I
CP
I
)
(2)
Where, I
CP
denotes the length of cyclic prefix and I =
I
CP
+I
S
is the length of the transmitted symbol. Assuming
I
S
= 1u2.4 ps andI
CP
= 12.8 ps and using them in eq. (2)
the SNR loss will be around u.S JB.

It can be seen from Fig. 3 that the system BER performance
for CC coded QPSK-OFDM would reach a much lower bit
error rate at an earlier signal to noise ratio. As an example
the un-coded QPSK-OFDM will achieve a target BER of
1u
-4
at an SNR of 8.5 dB whereas the coded system will
achieve the same BER at 6.2 dB.
Fig 2: OFDM Performance over AWGN Channel

Figure 3 shows that for a convolutional coder of R = and
constraint length of K = 7, at a BER of 10
-5
there is a coding
gain of 2.4 dB over the un-coded performance. Further
improvements in system performance is also possible via the
concatenation of an outer Reed Solomon code, RS (11, 15,
4), with the inner rate convolutional code of constraint
length 7. For the concatenated scheme the system
performance under AWGN noise is as depicted in Fig. 4.
Clearly, for a target BER of 10
-4
using RS (11, 15, 4) as the
outer encoder brings in an extra 2.2 dB gain when compared
to the CC coded system performance.

Fig 3: Performance of R = Convolutional Coded OFDM-QPSK
transmission over AWGN Channel
Fig 4: CC and RS-CC Coded QPSK-OFDM BER Performance over
AWGN channel.



B. Performance of un-coded QPSK-OFDM over Multipath
Rayleigh Fading Channels

Performance of the multipath channel can be much worse
than that in an AWGN channel. This is due to various
channel parameters. The parameter which affects data
transmission the most in the context of small scale fading is
the Doppler frequency. Doppler frequency can be expressed
as:

m
=

x
c

(3)

Where, f
m
is the maximum Doppler frequency, v is the
vehicular speed and
c
is the wavelength of the carrier.
Hereafter in this paper mobility of the receiver will be taken
into consideration. In this section of the paper we will
compare the system performances over the COST 207
Typical Urban (TU), COST 207 Bad Urban (BU) and the
Wiener channel models at different Doppler frequencies. As
to justify the correctness of the simulated results some
theoretical BER curves were also provided using eq. (4)
obtained from [1].

P
b
(y ) =
1
2
_
S
4
-_
y
1 +y
_1 -
1
n
tan
-1
_
y
1 +y
__
(4)

with,
y =
E
b
n
2
]
d
2
3]
2
E
b
+ N
0



Making use of the relative power delay profile values
provided in Tables II, III and IV and using Jakes sum of
sinusoids model [12], three different performance curves
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
10
-6
10
-5
10
-4
10
-3
10
-2
10
-1
10
0


Eb / No (dB)
B
E
R
Coded BER
Uncoded BER
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
10
-4
10
-3
10
-2
10
-1
10
0
Eb/No (dB)
B
E
R


SimRS-CC-QPSK-OFDM-AWGN
SimCC-QPSK-OFDM-AWGN
Theor BER

were simulated for each channel using Doppler shifts of
100Hz, 400Hz, and 833 Hz (corresponding to speeds of 30
Km/hr, 125 Km/hr, and 250 Km/hr respectively).



Fig 5: Theoretical Un-coded OFDM Performance over Rayleigh Multipath
Fading Channel


The power and delay parameters for the COST 207 TU
channel has been listed for the 12 tap scenario in Table II.
These values have been adopted from [13] and the BER vs.
E
b
/N
o
curve obtained for the COST 207 TU channel is
provided in Fig. 6.

Table II: COST 207 TU channel parameters
Tap Number Relative
Delay (x)
Fading (dB)
0 0 -4
1 0.2 -3
2 0.4 0
3 0.6 -2
4 0.8 -3
5 1.2 -5
6 1.4 -7
7 1.8 -5
8 2.4 -6
9 3.0 -9
10 3.2 -11
11 5.0 -10

Similarly, Table III shows the power and delay parameters
for the COST 207 Bad Urban (BU) channel and Fig. 7
depicts the BER performance of the system over this
channel.


Fig 6: System BER performance over COST 207 TU channel

Table III: COST 207 BU channel parameters
Tap Number Relative Delay(s) Fading (dB)
0 0 -7
1 0.2 -3
2 0.4 -1
3 0.8 0
4 1.6 -2
5 2.2 -6
6 3.2 -7
7 5.0 -1
8 6.0 -2
9 7.2 -7
10 5.0 -10
11 10.0 -15

Fig 7: System performance over COST 207 BU channel





Note that both in Figs. 6 and 7, as the Doppler frequency
increases, the error floor in the BER moves higher. A brief
comparison of the two sets of results, indicate that the
QPSK-OFDM will perform better in the typical urban case.
This is expected because the maximum relative delay of the
bad urban channel is twice that of the typical urban channel.

The best performance was achieved over the Winner
vehicular NLOS channel using the power delay profile
values provided in Table IV.

Table IV: Power Delay Profile for Winner Vehicular NLOS
Channel
Tap
index
Relative
Delay(ns)
Average
Power(dB)
1 0 -1.25
2 10 0
3 40 -0.38
4 60 -0.1
5 85 -0.73
6 110 -0.63
7 135 -1.78
8 165 -4.07
9 190 -5.12
10 220 -6.34
11 245 -7.35
12 270 -8.86
13 300 -10.1
14 325 -10.5
15 350 -11.3
16 375 -12.6
17 405 -13.9
18 430 -14.1
19 460 -15.3
20 485 -16.3

In comparison to the performance obtained over the COST
207 channels the BER curve for the Winner vehicular NLOS
model was lower (refer to Fig. 8). This behavior is expected
because even though the Winner scenario 2.8 has 20 taps the
max delay it incurs is 485 ns. This is only 10 times smaller
in comparison to the 5s for the COST207 TU channel.
Fig 8: BER Performance of Un-Coded QPSK-OFDM over Winner
Scenario. 2.8



C. Performance of coded QPSK-OFDM over Multipath
Rayleigh Fading Channels

This section of the paper demonstrates the advantage of
using a rate R = convolutional code with a constraint
length of K = 7 as opposed to not using coding at all. The
BER performance of the CC coded QPSK-OFDM system is
shown in Fig. 9. The channel assumed is the COST 207 TU.

Fig 9: BER for CC Coded QPSK-OFDM Over COST207 TU Channel
The BER performance of QPSK-OFDM with only RS
coding is also demonstrated in Fig. 10. In order to be
consistent the COST207 TU channel has again been
assumed.


Fig 10: BER for Reed Solomon Coded QPSK-OFDM Over COST207 TU


Note that, the convolutional coded QPSK-OFDM system
has better performance for higher SNR values only.
Typically above 17 dB, the performance obtained using
convolutional coding scheme outperforms the one obtained
using the Reed Solomon coding scheme.




Figure 11 shows the BER performance of the RS/CC coded
QPSK-OFDM system. Clearly the usage of an outside RS
encoder brings a big improvement to the system
performance. For example at an E
b
/N
0
of 20dB the BER gain
is approximately two and a half orders of magnitude better
than the CC coded version and RS coded version.

Fig 11: BER for QPSK-OFDM With RS-CC Coding Over COST207 TU


Please note that the fluctuation in the error floor of RS+CC
coded QPSK-OFDM can be further smoothed if the number
of iterations in the Monte Carlo simulations is further
increased.

Further experiments with the RS/CC concatenated system
pointed out that, when both scattered and burst type bit
errors were assumed the best BER performance was
attainable with half the bit errors as scattered and the other
half as burst. For further details please refer to [14].

V. CONCLUSION
In this paper we presented the performance of un-coded vs.
coded QPSK-OFDM system over AWGN and non-
frequency selective multipath Rayleigh fading channels. The
fading channels assumed were the Winner and the COST
207. For the COST 207, the two environments simulated
were the Typical Urban (TU) and the bad urban (BU).
Simulations carried out over the AWGN channel indicated
that both the CC coding and RS/CC coding will bring extra
gains to the system. The best BER performance was
obtained over the Winner channel (smallest delay spread)
and this was followed by the COST 207 TU and COST 207
BU. As expected, the BU showed a bit more inferior
performance in comparison to the COST 207 TU due to its
larger delay spread (10 micro seconds as opposed to 5).
Since in our study no equalization was assumed the effect of
coding could be observed much more distinctly. For
example, when CC is used for QPSK-OFDM transmission
over the COST207 TU fading channel the error floor would
occur close to a BER of 10
-4
as opposed to 10
-2
for an un-
coded system. Simulations based on the encoder parameters
given in Table I, point out that for individual coders the
error correction ability is much lower than that of the
concatenated system. In fact when mixed type bit errors
were assumed in a RS/CC coded system the best
performance would be achieved when bit errors were
equally divided between the two error types.


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