International Journal of Innovative Research in Advanced Engineering (IJIRAE)

Volume 1 Issue 9 (October 2014)

ISSN: 2349-2163
www.ijirae.com

EFFECT OF CYCLIC PREFIX ON OFDM OVER AWGN

CHANNEL
1

ADEWUYI S.O.,2 LAWAL W.,3 OGUNTI E.O.

Department of Electrical/Electronic Engineering, Rufus Giwa Polytechnics Owo, Ondo State, Nigeria.
Department of Electrical/Electronic Engineering, Federal University of Technology Akure,Ondo State Nigeria
Department of Electrical/Electronic Engineering, Federal University of Technology Akure,Ondo State Nigeria

Abstract -- OFDM has come to stay in communication system design due to its ability to mitigate frequency selective fading
in a multipath channel. Intersymbol interference is a major constraint to transmitted bits after conversion of data to be
transmitted from frequency domain to time domain before transmission through the multipath fading channel. To
overcome this, a cyclic prefix is inserted in between the OFDM symbols to prevent (intersymbol interference) ISI, making
the Symbol period longer. In this paper, the effect of cyclic prefix in an OFDM system over idea channel AWGN is
presented.
Keywords: OFDM, AWGN, Cyclic prefix Intersymbol interference, Fading Channel.

1. INTRODUCTION
A receiver is said to be optimum if it yields the minimum probability of error, Pe. One of the primary performance-limiting
factors inherent in wireless channels is multipath fading, which is resulted from the reflection, diffraction or refraction of the
transmitted waveforms through different propagation paths. The superimposed multipath radio waves could add up either
constructively or destructively at the receiver owing to their phase differences, and this will result in power fluctuation and
phase distortion of the received signals, or, multipath fading. Several multicarrier techniques have been proposed to overcome
the fading of which OFDM is found to be the most suitable. OFDM is a modulation technique especially suitable for wireless
communication due to its resistance to intersymbol interference (ISI). Although the idea of OFDM started back in 1966, it has
never been widely utilized until the last decade when it becomes the modem of choice in wireless applications [1].
NOMENCLATURE
AWGN
Additive White Gaussian Noise
BER
Bit Error Rate
CDF
Cumulative Distribution Function
dB
FDM
ICI
ISI
HF
OFDM

Decibel
Frequency Division Multiplexing
Intercarrier Interference
Intersymbol Interference
High Frequency
Orthogonal Frequency Division multiplexing

Pe
SNR
WGN
QPSK
BPSK
QAM

Probability of Error
Signal to Noise Ratio
White Gaussian Noise
Quartenary Phase Shift Keying
Binary Phase Shift keying
Quadrature amplitude modulation

Complex path gain

Number of paths
Path delay
fd
Doppler Spread
Ts
Symbol Period
Tc
Coherence time
OFDM
Root Mean Square (RMS) value of
voltage in a received signal
Time-average power of the received signal
NLOS
Non Line-of-sight
R
Rayleigh Distribution
In a single carrier communication system, the symbol period must be much greater than the delay time in order to avoid
intersymbol interference (ISI) [2]. Since data rate is inversely proportional to symbol period, having long symbol periods
means low data rate and communication inefficiency.
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International Journal of Innovative Research in Advanced Engineering (IJIRAE)

Volume 1 Issue 9 (October 2014)

ISSN: 2349-2163
www.ijirae.com

A multicarrier system, such as FDM (Frequency Division Multiplexing), divides the total available bandwidth in the spectrum
into sub-bands for multiple carriers to transmit in parallel. An overall high data rate can be achieved by placing carriers
closely in the spectrum.
However, intercarrier interference (ICI) will occur due to lack of spacing to separate the carriers. To avoid inter-carrier
interference, guard bands will need to be placed in between any adjacent carriers, which results in lowered data rate. OFDM
(Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) is a multicarrier digital communication scheme to solve both issues. It
combines a large number of low data rate carriers to construct a composite high data rate communication system.
Orthogonality gives the carriers a valid reason to be closely spaced, even overlapped, without inter-carrier interference. Low
data rate of each carrier implies long symbol periods, which greatly diminishes intersymbol interference [3].
The concept of OFDM in term of parallel transmission was first developed in the 50s and introduced in some papers in the mid
60s. OFDM signalling was developed back in the [4]and used in some military HF communication systems [5].It was also
considered for use in high-speed modems [6], but did not significantly develop in this field, and international CCITT standards
for high-speed modems are based on single-carrier transmission. It was later proposed for digital mobile radio systems [7] to
alleviate the channel equalization problem, increase robustness against impulse noise, and possibly make a better use of the
available channel bandwidth.
OFDM can be seen as either a modulation technique or a multiplexing technique. One of the main reasons to use OFDM is
to increase the robustness against frequency selective fading or narrowband interference. In a single carrier system, a single
fade or interfere can cause the entire link to fail, but in a multicarrier system, only a small percentage of the subcarriers will be
affected. Error correction coding can then be used to correct for the few erroneous subcarriers. In digital Communication,
modulation can be defined as mapping of the information on changes in the carrier phase, frequency or amplitude, or
combination. Multiplexing is a method of sharing a bandwidth with other independent data channel. OFDM is a special case of
FDM, which combines modulation and multiplexing. Multiplexing generally refers to independent signals produced by
different sources. Hence, in OFDM, the question of multiplexing is applied to independent signals but these independent
signals are a subset of the one main signal. In OFDM, the signal itself is first split into independent channels, modulated by
data and then re-multiplexed to create the OFDM carrier.
1.2
THE PRINCIPLE OF OFDM TRANSMISSION
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a multicarrier transmission technique, which divides the bandwidth
into many carriers; each one is modulated by a low rate data stream. In term of multiple access technique, OFDM is similar to
FDMA in that the multiple user access is achieved by subdividing the available bandwidth into multiple channels that are
then allocated to users. However, OFDM uses the spectrum much more efficiently by spacing the channels much
closer together. This is achieved by making all the carriers orthogonal to one another, preventing interference
between the closely spaced carriers. Pictorially it can be represented as shown in the figure 1 .[8]

Fig 1: Concept of OFDM Signal: Orthogonal Multicarrier Technique versus Conventional Multicarrier Technique.

The figure shows the difference between the conventional non-overlapping multicarrier technique and overlapping
multicarrier modulation technique. Using the overlapping multicarrier modulation technique, we save almost 50% of
bandwidth. To realize the overlapping multicarrier technique, however we need to reduce crosstalk between subcarriers,
which means that we want orthogonality between the different modulated carriers.
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International Journal of Innovative Research in Advanced Engineering (IJIRAE)

Volume 1 Issue 9 (October 2014)

ISSN: 2349-2163
www.ijirae.com

1.3 INTERSYMBOL AND INTERCARRIER INTERFERENCE.

In a multipath environment, a transmitted symbol takes different times to reach the receiver through different propagation
paths. From the receivers point of view, the channel introduces time dispersion in which the duration of the received symbol is
stretched. Extending the symbol duration causes the current received symbol to overlap previous received symbols and results
in intersymbol interference (ISI) [9]. In OFDM, ISI usually refers as interference of an OFDM symbol by previous OFDM
symbols.
1.4 MULTIPATH EFFECTS.
In mobile communications, the signal is degraded by terrestrial multipath fading in the lower atmosphere known as
troposphere..[10] This troposphere is between altitude of 0 and 70 km and consists of many objects such as buildings,
mountains, trees, moving cars, sign posts at the ground surface and natural phenomena like temperature, humidity, rainfall, etc
at above the ground surface. These artificial and natural phenomena obstruct the transmitted signal, hindered the signal to
reflect, refract, diffract and scatter, and move in different paths called multipath propagation causing the received signal to be
degraded. The different paths add up constructively when the received signal paths are in phase and destructively under
unfavourable phase conditions. The effects of terrestrial multipath propagation are signal fading, delay spread which is very
dominant in urban environment leading to intersymbol interference (ISI) distortion, and lastly the doppler spread which occurs
when there is relative motion in terrestrial environment. Therefore, these result in signal fluctuation at the receiver.[11] In
wireless channel, the medium is the free space. In this case, there is no specified or particular path for signal transmission. The
transmitted signal may get reflected from many things like hills, trees, etc before being received at the destined receiver. This
can give rise to multiple transmission paths up to the receiver. The relative phase of the multiple reflected signals causes
destructive or constructive interference at the receiver. This is normally experienced for very short distances (typically at half
of the wavelength distances), thus is given the term - fast fading. These variations can vary from10 to 30dB [12]. over short
distances.
1.5 FADING STATISTICS IN RADIO CHANNEL
In communications systems, fading occurs due to the multipath propagation. As a result, signals reaching the receiver from
several different paths that may have different lengths corresponding to different time delays and gains. Time delay causes
additional phase shifts to the main signal component. Therefore, the signal reaching the receiver is the sum of some copies of
the original signal with different delays and gains. With this explanation, the channel impulse response can be modelled as
described in [13] with the equation given below:
( ) =

) 1

Where:
= Complex path gain
= Number of paths
= Path delay
Fading can be classified into two different scales:
Small Scale fading: small-scale fading happens in very short time duration, is caused by reectors, and scatters that change the
amplitude, phase and angle of the arriving signal. Rayleigh distribution and Rician distribution are often used to dene small
scale fading.
Large Scale fading: Large-scale fading is due to shadowing and the mobile station should move over a large distance to
overcome the eects of shadowing. Log-normal distribution is often used to define large-scale fading.
Fast Fading
In a fast fading channel, the rate of change of the channel is higher than the signal symbol period and hence the
channel changes over one period. In other words, the channel coherence time , is smaller than the symbol period . is
related to the Doppler spread, , as:

=0.423/

From this relation it is clear that a high Doppler spread results in a smaller channel
coherence time. The coherence time of 0.423ms corresponding to a
of 1 kHz is clear.
Slow Fading
As the name suggests, in a slow fading channel, the channel coherence time is larger than the symbol period and
hence the channel remains approximately static over a symbol or multiple symbols. From the above equation it is clear that
slow fading is usually expected with low Doppler spread values; i.e. with slower moving obstacles and receiver/transmitter.
Multipath delay spread based and Doppler spread based fades are completely independent of each other and hence is quite
possible to have a flat, fast fading channel or a flat, slow fading channel; and so on.
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International Journal of Innovative Research in Advanced Engineering (IJIRAE)

Volume 1 Issue 9 (October 2014)

ISSN: 2349-2163
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1.6 ADDITIVE WHITE GAUSSIAN NOISE

Zero-mean white Gaussian Noise (WGN) has the same power spectral density AWGN (f) for all frequencies. The
adjective white is used in the sense that white light contains equal amounts of all frequencies within the visible band of
electromagnetic radiation. The autocorrelation function of WGN is given by the inverse Fourier transform of the noise power
spectral density GWGN (f): The autocorrelation function RaWGN (t) is zero for t 0. This means that any two different
samples of WGN, no matter how close together in time they are taken, are uncorrelated. The noise signal WGN (t) is totally
decorrelated from its time-shifted version for any t 0.

Fig 2:Signal with AWGN Noise

The amplitude of integrated (bandwidth) WGN has a Gaussian probability density distribution P (WGNi).Noise
exists in all communications systems operating over an analog physical channel, such as radio. The main sources are thermal
background noise, electrical noise in the receiver amplifiers, & inter-cellular interference. In addition, this noise can also be
generated internally to the communications system because of Intersymbol Interference, Intercarrier Interference &
Intermodulation Distortion. These sources of noise decrease the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) & thus limiting the spectral
efficiency of the system. Noise is the main detrimental effect in most radio communication systems. Most types of noise
present in radio communication systems can be modelled accurately using Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN). This
noise has a uniform spectral density & a Gaussian distribution in amplitude. Thermal & electrical noise from amplification,
primarily have white Gaussian noise properties, allowing them to be modelled accurately with AWGN. In addition, most other
noise sources have AWGN properties due to the transmission being OFDM. OFDM signals have a flat spectral density & a
Gaussian amplitude distribution if the number of carriers is large, because of this the inter-cellular interference from other
OFDM systems have AWGN properties. For the same reason ICI, and ISI also have AWGN properties for OFDM signals.
1.7
RAYLEIGH FADING DISTRIBUTION
Rayleigh distributions are defined for fading of a channel when all the received signals are reflected signals and there
is no dominant component. The Rayleigh distribution has a Probability Density Functions (PDF) given as:[13]
(0 )
3
0 ( 0)
Where is the Root Mean Square (RMS) value of voltage in a received signal and
is the time-average power of
the received signal. The Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF) is defined to specify the probability that the received signal
does not exceed a specific threshold [16] gives the CDF
( ) =

exp

( )= ( )=

( )

= 1 exp

The Rayleigh distribution is commonly used to describe the statistical time varying nature of the received signal
power. It describes the probability of the signal level being received due to fading. The probability of the signal level for the
Rayleigh distribution is shown in this following table 1:
Table 1: Cummulative Distribution for Rayleigh distribution [14]
Signal Level (dB about median)
10
0
-10
-20
-30

% Probability of signal level

being less than the value given
99
50
5
0.5
0.05

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When information is transmitted in an environment with obstacles (Non Line-of-sight - NLOS) more than one transmission
paths will appear as result of the reflection(s). The receiver will then have to process a signal, which is a super-position of
several different transmission paths. If there exists a large number of transmission paths may be modelled as statistically
independent; the central limit theorem will give the channel the statistical characteristics of a Rayleigh Distribution.

Fig. 3: Rayleigh distribution

2.0

RESULT AND SIMULATION

To analyse the effect of cyclic prefix on an OFDM system over AWGN channel, simulations were performed using Simulink
Matlab Software and the results are been discussed in the plots of BER against SNR below:
0

10

-1

10

-2

BER

10

-3

10

-4

10

10

15

20
EbNo [dB]

25

30

35

40

Fig 4: Single Carrier Modulation Schemes over Multipath Rayleigh Fading.

0

10

OFDM-BPSK
OFDM-QPSK
OFDM-4QAM
OFDM-16QAM

-1

10

-2

BER

10

-3

10

-4

10

10

15

20
EbNo [dB]

25

30

35

40

Fig 5: BER versus SNR for OFDM over Multipath Rayleigh fading Channel with different modulation Schemes.

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International Journal of Innovative Research in Advanced Engineering (IJIRAE)

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ISSN: 2349-2163
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10

BPSK
QPSK
4QAM
16QAM

-1

10

-2

BER

10

-3

10

-4

10

10

15

20
EbNo [dB]

25

30

35

40

Fig 6: BER versus SNR for Single Carrier over AWGN with different modulation Schemes
0

10

OFDM-BPSK
OFDM-QPSK
OFDM-4QAM
OFDM-16QAM

-1

10

-2

BER

10

-3

10

-4

10

10

15

20
EbNo [dB]

25

30

35

40

Fig 7: BER versus SNR for OFDM with Cyclic Prefix over AWGN with different modulation Schemes
0

10

OFDM-BPSK
OFDM-QPSK
OFDM-4QAM
OFDM-16QAM

-1

10

-2

BER

10

-3

10

-4

10

10

15

20
EbNo [dB]

25

30

35

40

Fig 8: BER versus SNR for OFDM without Cyclic Prefix over AWGN with different modulation Schemes.
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International Journal of Innovative Research in Advanced Engineering (IJIRAE)

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ISSN: 2349-2163
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It can be seen from figure 3 and 4 above, that OFDM is employed to mitigate multipath interference over a fading
channel and not an idea AWGN channel. Error in a Single Carrier is enormous making the graph not to converge as shown in
fig 3, while OFDM Optimum receiver was with minimum error with convergence over Rayleigh multipath fading as in fig 4.
From figure 5, the performance of different modulation schemes in a Single Carrier Modulation System is analyzed
such that BPSK requires a SNR of at least 6 dB, QPSK modulation scheme needs an SNR of 12 dB, 4-QAM uses 11 dB and
16-QAM requires 14 dB.
It can also be analyzed from figures 6 and 7 above that since OFDM technique is not intended to overcome the effect
of AWGN, hence the performance of OFDM is almost similar to a BPSK, QPSK, 4-QAM and 16-QAM standard Single
Carrier digital transmission. OFDM has worse performance in an AWGN because of the Cyclic Prefix has made the symbol
period longer than in a Single Carrier. When Cyclic Prefix is removed from OFDM, it has almost the same performance with
Single Carrier. An equalizer is not needed when using AWGN.
So it can be seen from the graph that in an OFDM without Cyclic Prefix over AWGN i.e. fig. 7, modulation scheme
when compared with Single Carrier over AWGN i.e. fig 5, BPSK will need SNR of 4 dB as against 16 dB when with Cyclic
Prefix in fig 6. This when compared with Single Carrier has just 2 dB difference. In addition, with QPSK modulation scheme,
an SNR of 12 dB will be needed as against 35 dB when with Cyclic Prefix and of the same SNR with the Single Carrier. For 4QAM modulation Scheme, OFDM over AWGN without Cyclic Prefix will make use of 7 dB as against 30 dB when with
Cyclic Prefix and a difference of 4 dB when compared with a Single Carrier. An SNR of 17 dB will be required of the OFDM
system with 16-QAM modulation Scheme when the system is without Cyclic Prefix as against 40 dB it will use when with
Cyclic Prefix. This gives a difference of about 3 dB between OFDM without Cyclic Prefix and a Single Carrier.
CONCLUSION
Hence, from this research work, it has been shown that OFDM has worst performance over AWGN Channel because
of the cyclic Prefix inclusion that makes the symbol period longer. It can then be concluded that OFDM is crucial in multipath
fading environment because it has the ability to counter and resolve Frequency Selective fading environment due to its ability
to resolve selective fading channel into flat fading by one tap equalizer. This implies that, the OFDM has an ability to
overcome the effect of burst error due to sudden noise such as lightning by using parallel data transmission, so that instead of
several adjacent bits being completely error, many symbols are only slightly distorted, and they can be fixed using a simple
Forward Error Correction (FEC) method.
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