IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BROADCASTING, VOL. 60, NO.

2, JUNE 2014

347

A Low-Complexity Robust OFDM Receiver for

Fast Fading Channels
Liang Zhang, Member, IEEE, Zhihong Hong, Louis Thibault, Richard Boudreau,
and Yiyan Wu, Fellow, IEEE

AbstractOrthogonal
frequency
division
multiplexing
(OFDM) receivers suffer significant performance degradation in
time-varying fast fading channels because of the inter-carrier
interference (ICI) induced by the Doppler effect. We previously
proposed a novel iterative decision-directed channel estimation
and ICI cancellation technique which can provide robust
performance for mobile OFDM receivers moving at fast vehicle
speed. The nutshell of the proposed technique is a channel
estimator which is capable of estimating the ICI gains on each
off-diagonal vector of the channel frequency response matrix
of a doubly-selective fading channel, which corresponds to the
ICI induced by the neighbor subcarrier symbol to current
subcarrier. In this paper, we generalize the channel estimator
and provide theoretical analysis on the achievable performance.
As an application to digital video broadcasting terrestrial
system, we provide intensive simulation results and detailed
comparison on implementation complexity and performance
with existing techniques to showcase the significance of the
proposed technique in practical applications.
Index TermsOFDM, channel estimation, fast fading, mobile
reception, inter-carrier interference, decision-directed.

I. I NTRODUCTION
RTHOGONAL Frequency Division Multiplexing
(OFDM) is chosen by many modern wireless communication systems because of its robustness against
multipath fading and efficient implementation via Fast Fourier
Transform (FFT). These include Digital Video Broadcasting
DVB-T/H/SH, IEEE 802.11, 802.16 systems, and 3GPP Long
Term Evolution (LTE).
Unfortunately, OFDM systems are vulnerable to Doppler
effect in fast time-varying channels, which causes power leakage among subchannels, often referred to as Inter-Carrier
Interference (ICI) [1], [2]. Designing robust OFDM receivers
in fast fading channels has been investigated extensively in

Manuscript received July 17, 2013; revised April 1, 2014; accepted

April 10, 2014. Date of publication May 16, 2014; date of current version
June 4, 2014.
L. Zhang and Z. Hong are with the Wireless Technology Research Branch,
Communications Research Centre Canada, Ottawa, ON K2H 8S2, Canada
(e-mail: liang.lu-zhang@crc.gc.ca; zhihong.hong@crc.gc.ca).
L. Tibault, retired, was with the Advanced Audio Systems Group,
Communications Research Centre Ottawa, ON K2H 8S2, Canada.
R. Boudreau is with the Performance and Applications Branch,
Communications Research Centre Canada, Ottawa, ON K2H 8S2, Canada
(e-mail: richard.boudreau@crc.gc.ca).
Y. Wu is with the Networks and Systems Branch, Communications Research
Centre Canada, Ottawa, ON K2H 8S2, Canada (e-mail: yiyan.wu@crc.gc.ca).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TBC.2014.2321681

the literature. One category of such techniques is to design

OFDM systems with low power leakage. ICI self-cancellation
techniques are proposed in [3], [4], [5], which use precoding at
the transmitter to achieve low ICI power in the received signal. However, these schemes sacrifice significant bandwidth
efficiency. In [6], [7], time-domain windowing is applied to
OFDM systems to reduce the power leakage between subchannels, thus reducing the ICI power. In [8], the authors proposed
to apply time-domain windowing and the low-complexity
frequency-domain iterative block-wise Minimum Mean Square
Error (MMSE) symbol detection to achieve good ICI mitigation with low complexity. All these techniques require
modification of the transmission waveform and thus are not
applicable to most existing OFDM systems.
A second category of Doppler mitigation techniques are
receiver ICI cancellation techniques. Unlike the additive white
Gaussian noise (AWGN), ICI has a systematic structure. With
the knowledge of the transmission data and wireless channel,
the receiver can re-generate the ICI and cancel it from the
received signal. In [9], a time-domain ICI cancellation scheme
is proposed based on estimating the time-domain channel
impulse response. While it is shown that the ICI cancellation
is performed with affordable complexity, the channel estimation is fairly complex. Frequency-domain MMSE equalization
with successive interference cancellation (SIC) is investigated in [10]. This technique provides good performance but
requires a prohibitive implementation complexity for typical
OFDM systems having a large number of subchannels. In [11],
the authors proposed a more efficient implementation of the
MMSE-based ICI suppression technique, where the complexity order is reduced from O(N 3 ) to O(N 2 ), N being the number
of subchannels. A Decision-Feedback (DFE) ICI cancellation
scheme was proposed to further reduce the complexity. The
complexity of the MMSE equalizer can also be reduced by
the block-wise MMSE solutions proposed in [12], [13] where
the asymptotic complexity becomes O(N). However, in these
ICI mitigation methods, the channel and ICI gain estimates are
obtained assuming the presence of time-domain pilot symbols,
which is not conformable with many OFDM systems using
in-band pilots.
Mostofi [14] and Fischer [15] proposed ICI cancellation
methods assuming linearly-varying channel response within
one OFDM symbol, where the receiver estimates the channel response and the slope of the channel variation. In [16],
the authors proposed a channel estimation and ICI cancellation scheme based on stochastic power series expansion

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348

of the time-varying channel response (PSEICI), where the

0th-order term is the channel response and the higher-order
derivatives are responsible for causing the ICI. The channel response and derivatives are estimated using an MMSE
algorithm which requires a complexity too high for practical implementation. An iterative decision-directed multi-stage
implementation (IMS-PSEICI) is proposed in [17] to reduce
the complexity. The implementation can be further simplified
by assuming linear time-varying channel response.
In this paper, we generalize the iterative decision-directed
ICI cancellation (IDDICI) technique, initially reported by the
authors in [18], [19], which addresses the ICI gain estimation
from a different perspective unlike the existing techniques. The
IDDICI is based on the observation that a strong correlation
exists among the ICI gains on each off-diagonal of the channel
frequency response matrix (CFRM). This property is exploited
to accurately estimate each off-diagonal vector of the CFRM.
With decision feedbacks and the CFRM estimate, the ICI can
be regenerated and subtracted from the received signal for
more reliable data detection. A detailed comparison between
the proposed technique and the existing techniques will be
presented in Section V which illustrates the significance of the
proposed techniques in terms of lower complexity and better
performance.
As an application of the IDDICI, we consider DVB-T system, which is the most widely deployed digital broadcasting
system worldwide. It is highly desirable to deploy the DVB-T
systems in 8k mode, as it allows the largest transmitter separation in a Single-Frequency-Network (SFN) configuration. It is
also highly desirable to use 64QAM with higher error correction code rates for better spectrum efficiency. In fact, the most
popular deployment of current DVB-T services uses 8k mode
with 64QAM and rate-2/3 convolutional code. However, this
configuration poses significant challenges for mobile receivers
to achieve robust service detection [20], [21]. In this paper, we
demonstrate the robust performance achieved by implementing
the IDDICI algorithm in DVB-T mobile receivers.
Multiple receive antenna techniques can improve the performance of OFDM receivers in fast fading channels [22][24].
However, it is shown that these techniques can improve the
receiver mobility to a certain extent, after which the error floor
resulting from ICI would again make it impossible to achieve
good signal detection. In this paper, we show that by combining the proposed IDDICI with receive antenna diversity, the
speed limit can be greatly extended.
Although DVB-T is used as the sample application for the
proposed IDDICI technique, it is directly applicable to later
DVB-T2 standard, especially for high-throughput applications
with high constellation size and very high coding rate such as
5/6 or higher.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section II
provides an overview on the OFDM transmission over doublyselective wireless channels. In Section III, we present the
generalized IDDICI and its low-complexity LC-IDDICI algorithm for practical implementation. In Section IV, theoretical
performance analysis of the IDDICI scheme is conducted,
and numerical results on the performance of IDDICI and
LC-IDDICI as an application to DVB-T system is also

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BROADCASTING, VOL. 60, NO. 2, JUNE 2014

demonstrated. In Section V, we demonstrate the advantage of

LC-IDDICI via a detailed complexity comparison with existing
techniques. Finally, conclusions are drawn in Section VI.
II. OFDM S YSTEM IN T IME -VARYING M ULTIPATH
FADING C HANNELS
In a coherent OFDM system with N subchannels, a
frequency-domain data vector X of length N is modulated into
a time-domain vector, x, by an N-point IFFT. A cyclic prefix (CP) is added to x before it is sent into the channel. It is
assumed that the length of the CP is longer than the channel
multipath delay spread (DS) so there is no inter-symbol interference (ISI) at the receiver when proper time synchronization
is acquired.
A. System Model
Consider a multipath fading channel with a delay spread
of L OFDM sample duration (T). The received OFDM signal
from this time-varying channel can be expressed as
y(n) =

L1


h(l, n)x(n l) + z(n)

(1)

l=0

where x(n)/y(n) is the nth transmitted/received sample in one

OFDM symbol, h(l, n) is the time-varying channel gain of the
lth tap, L is the channel delay spread in sample duration, and
z(n) are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) complex
Gaussian random processes.
Assuming perfect time synchronization at the receiver, after
the CP is removed, the frequency-domain symbols in the N
subchannels are obtained by OFDM demodulation with an Npoint FFT, the received symbol in the kth subchannel can be
expressed as,
N1k


Y(k) = H(k)X(k) +

Hd (k)X(k + d) + Z(k)

d=k,d=0

= H(k)X(k) + I(k) + Z(k)

(2)

where H(k) is the multiplicative channel gain of the kth

subchannel and is calculated as,
H(k) =

L1


g(l)ej N lk

(3)

l=0

with


g(l) =

1
N

0,

N1
n=0

h(l, n), 0 l L
.
l>L

(4)

Hd (k) in (2) is the multiplicative ICI gain from the (k +d)th

subchannel into the kth subchannel, which is calculated as,
Hd (k) =

N1 N1
2
1 
h(l, n)ej N (dn+lk+ld)
N

(5)

n=0 n=0

Let Y = [Y(0), . . . , Y(N 1)]T and X = [X(0), . . . , X(N

1)]T being the received and transmitted vector, (2) can be
expressed in matrix form as,
Y = FX + Z

(6)

ZHANG et al.: LOW-COMPLEXITY ROBUST OFDM RECEIVER FOR FAST FADING CHANNELS

349

I(k) = Y(k) X(k)H(k)

N1k

Ha (k)X(k + a) + Z(k)
=
a=k,a=0

= Hd (k)X(k + d) +

N1k


Ha (k)X(k + a) + Z(k)

a=k,a=0,d

= Id (k) + Zdt (k)

(8)

In (8), Id (k) is the ICI contributed by the (k + d)th subchannel, Zdt (k) is the sum of the ICI contributions from other
adjacent subchannels and the AWGN.
Eq. (8) can be expressed in a matrix format as,
Fig. 1.

Channel frequency response matrix, F .

where F is the channel frequency response matrix, containing

the channel gains on its diagonal, where F(k, k) = H(k) in (2),
and the ICI gains on its non-diagonal entries, where F(k, k +
d) = Hd (k) in (2). A schematic illustration of CFRM is shown
in Fig. 1.
III. N OVEL C HANNEL E STIMATION AND ICI
C ANCELLATION A LGORITHM
A. Statistical Properties of the ICI Gain Vector
In order to regenerate and remove the ICI, I(k) in (2), the
receiver first needs to estimate the ICI gains Hd (k). Here
we briefly review the statistical properties of the ICI gain
Hd (k) [19].
An ICI gain vector is defined as Hd = [Hd (0), . . . , Hd (N
1)]T , which contains the multiplicative ICI gain from the (k +
d)th subchannel into the kth subchannel for k = 0 ... N
1. This vector, Hd , is essentially the dth off-diagonal in the
CFRM, F. It is shown in [19] that Hd can be considered
as the frequency-domain response of a time-domain leakage
channel", gd , which is expressed as,

N1
1 j 2
j 2
N ld
N dn , 0 l L
n=0 h(l, n)e
gd (l) = N e
. (7)
0,
l>L
Property 1: The ICI gain vector, Hd , is the Fourier transform of a leakage channel" with a channel impulse response
(CIR), gd , which has the same delay spread as the actual
channel response.
Property 2: For any d, the ICI gain vector, Hd , has the
same normalized frequency-domain correlation function as the
channel gain vector.
In the next section, we show that these two statistical properties enable us to estimate the ICI gain vectors in the CFRM
in a new approach.
B. ICI Gain Estimation

If the channel gain estimate H(k)

and the transmitted signal
X(k) are available at the receiver, the composite ICI component
in the kth subchannel can be obtained by subtracting the signal
component from the received symbol as

I = D {(X)d } Hd + Zdt = Ad Hd + Zdt

(9)

where (X)d is a vector obtained by cyclicly shifting X by d

positions, and D{X} is a diagonal matrix with vector X on its
diagonal.
A Least Square (LS) estimate of Hd can be obtained from
(9),
d = A1 I
H
d
The MMSE estimate of Hd for (9) is, [25]

1
d
d = Rd Rd + 2 (Ad AH )1
H
H
dt
d

(10)

(11)

where R is the ICI gain vector correlation matrix with

R(n, m) = Rd (n m), Rd can be calculated using the
Property 2, and dt2 is the variance of the total noise, Zdt .
The matrix inversion in (11) makes MMSE estimation
prohibitively complex for practical implementation. A linear
MMSE (LMMSE) algorithm is proposed in [26] as,

1

I
(12)
H
Hd = Rd Rd +
SNR
where I is a unit matrix of size N, is a constant depending
on signal constellation which is defined in [26], and SNR =
E {Hd } /dt2 .
Eq. (12) can be interpreted as an LMMSE smoothing filter,
which filters out a significant portion of the estimation noise in
d , thus generating a more reliable estimate.
the LS estimate, H
Although (12) no longer requires matrix inversion, it is still
very complex because of the multiplication of a N N matrix
with an N-point vector.
Several sub-optimal smoothing filters have been proposed
in the literature to further reduce the complexity, at the price
of certain performance loss. Among these are the SVD-based
estimator [26], the Wiener filter, and the DFT-filtering [27],
[28]. Both the SVD estimator and the Wiener filter require
knowledge of the correlation property of the ICI gains in
order to achieve the best performance, while the DFT-filtering
requires only the knowledge of channel delay spread.
Among these low-complexity smoothing filters, we pay special attention to the DFT-filtering, since it provides excellent
performance and can be efficiently implemented using the FFT
algorithm.

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d, a
To perform DFT-filtering over the LS estimate, H
transform domain representation is first obtained as,


d = FFT H
d
G
= FFT {Hd } + FFT {Zt }

(13)

where Zt is the estimation noise of the LS estimate.

From Property 1, it is obvious that the Fourier transform
of Hd only has non-zero values from Gd (0) to Gd (L). On the
other hand, the power spectrum of the estimation noise, Zt , in
the transform domain, is uniformly distributed over the entire
spectrum. Applying a low-pass windowing in the transform
domain can therefore remove a significant portion of the noise,

d (m), 0 m W
G

Gd (m) =
.
(14)
0,
m>W
where all the transform domain component of Hd is kept as
long as the the window size, W is larger than the channel delay
spread.
The smoothed" estimate is obtained by applying an IFFT
as,


d = IFFT G
d
(15)
H
d , has a mean square error
Assuming the LS estimate, H
(MSE) of JLS , the MSE after the DFT-filtering is reduced to,
W
JDFTF = JLS
(16)
N
In [11], it is shown that most of the ICI power on the kth
subchannel is contributed by a few closest adjacent subchannels. Therefore, by considering only the B closest subchannels
on each side, (8) can be re-written as,
I(k) =

B


Ha (k)X(k + a) + Ires + Z

(17)

a=B,a=0

where Ires contains the ICI contributions from subchannels

farther than B subchannel away.
Therefore, the receiver can estimate the 2B ICI gain vectors,
Ha with |a| B, and set the others to zero. If the value of B is
chosen carefully, the residual ICI will only introduce negligible
performance degradation.
C. Data Detection with ICI Cancellation
Although MMSE detection could be performed to obtain

optimal performance for (6) with the estimate of CFRM (F),

its complexity is usually prohibitive for practical implementation in most existing OFDM systems with large number of
subchannels. Low complexity alternatives are proposed in [16]
and [26], but they still require significant computational power.
A low complexity alternative is to perform ICI cancellation
using decision feedbacks followed by a single-tap equalization
as,

B
 

1

d X

=D H

Y
(18)
H
X
d=B,d=0

is an estimate of the transmission symbol generated

where X
from decision feedbacks.

Fig. 2.

Block diagram of an OFDM receiver with IDDICI.

D. Iterative Decision Directed Channel Estimation and ICI

Cancellation
A schematic illustration of an OFDM receiver with IDDICI
is shown in Fig. 2. The receiver first performs an initial signal
detection based on pilot-aided channel estimation and equalization, generating a tentative decision at the output of the
channel decoder. In fast fading channels, this decision is highly
unreliable due to the severe ICI.
To implement the IDDICI, the receiver performs the following operations upon the tentative decision bit sequence:
1) Decision feedback generation
An estimate of the transmission symbols, i.e. the deci is generated from the tentative
sion feedback (X),
bit decisions, by performing channel re-encoding, reinterleaving and re-modulation.
2) Decision-directed channel gain estimation
With the decision feedback, a more accurate channel
estimate can be obtained by using one of many decisiondirected channel estimation techniques, including the
MMSE estimator, Wiener filter, SVD-based estimator,
or DFT-filter.
3) Decision-directed ICI gain estimation

With the channel estimate and the decision feedback X,

the receiver now estimates the 2B ICI gain vectors, Hd ,
as proposed in Section III-B. The smoothing filter can be
any of the MMSE estimator, Wiener filter, SVD-based
estimator, or the DFT-filter.
4) ICI cancellation and signal detection
With the estimates of the channel and ICI gain vectors, the signal detection is performed by the decisiondirected ICI cancellation and one-tap equalization as
described in Section III-C. The output is a more reliable estimate of the transmitted symbols in the N
subchannels.
5) Demodulation, de-interleaving and channel decoding
At this step, the receiver performs demodulation on the
output of equalization, followed by de-interleaving and
channel decoding to obtain a more reliable decision bit
sequence.
This process can be iterated many times to achieve further performance improvement. The receiver usually ends the
iterative process when there is a clear indication of good service detection, or when a pre-defined number of iterations is
reached.

ZHANG et al.: LOW-COMPLEXITY ROBUST OFDM RECEIVER FOR FAST FADING CHANNELS

E. Improved LS Estimate of ICI Gain Vectors

The LS estimate of the ICI gains obtained by (9) is very
noisy because it treats the ICI contributions from other subchannels as additive noise. To improve the accuracy of the ICI
gain estimation, a less noisy LS estimate can be obtained by
removing a significant portion of the residual ICI using the ICI
gain estimates from previous iteration. For the ith iteration, a
cleaner LS estimate can be obtained as

a(i1) (k) X (i1) (k + a)
Yk Ba=B,a=d H
(i)

(19)
Hd (k)
X (i1) (k + d)
where X (i1) is the decision feedback vector from the (i1)th
a(i1) is the ICI gain vector estimated in the (i1)th
iteration, H
iteration.
F. Low Complexity ICI Gain Estimation
The proposed IDDICI technique needs to estimate 2B ICI
gain vectors. Although the value of B can be selected to provide a tradeoff between performance and complexity, it cannot
be too small for effective ICI cancellation.
For OFDM systems, a time-varying wireless channel can
be characterized as N parallel time-varying narrow-band flatfading channels. The CIR of each subchannel could be
approximated by a linear function during one OFDM symbol [14]. This approximation can be exploited to significantly
reduce the complexity of the IDDICI.
Lets first approximate the CIR on the kth subchannel by a
linearly time-varying function as,


N1

(20)
hk (n) = hk (0) + hk n
2
where hk is the slope of the linear function. The ICI gain
vector, Hd is now calculated as


N1 
dn
N1
1 
Hd (k) =
hk (0) + hk n
ej2 N
N
2
=
=

n=0


hk+d N1

dn

nej2 N

n=0
 N1

hk+d
2

1ej

2 d
N

The LC-IDDICI is suboptimal in the sense that it assumes

the subchannel CIRs are linear time-varying function. Despite
being suboptimal, LC-IDDICI does not suffer performance
degradation as compared to the IDDICI, as will be shown
in Section IV.
IV. T HEORETICAL P ERFORMANCE A NALYSIS AND
N UMERICAL R ESULTS
In this section, we evaluate the performance of an OFDM
receiver with IDDICI and LC-IDDICI. For both analytical
and numerical results, we consider a DVB-T system in 8k
mode with 64QAM modulation and rate-2/3 convolutional
code (CC). This is the most popular DVB-T system configuration deployed for high definition television services in Europe.
An 8 MHz bandwidth is assumed with a center RF frequency
at 645 MHz, which is in the middle of the TV broadcast spectrum. The wireless channel is assumed to follow the Typical
Urban (TU) channel model, for the sake of simplicity in analysis. However, the same analysis is applicable directly to Rician
channels with Line of Sight (LOS) component.
A. Residual ICI with Perfect IDDICI/LC-IDDICI
The power of the ICI, PICI is calculated as,


PICI = E I(k)I (k)



=
E |Hd |2
d=0

Pd

(23)

d=0

where Pd is the power of the ICI contribution from the dth

adjacent subchannel.
For the TU channel, the Pd is calculated as,
Pd = Rd (0)
N1
2
1 
= 2
J0 (2 fd (n m)Ts /N) ej N d(nm) (24)
N
n,m=0

d = 0 mod N
d = 0 mod N

(21)

From (21), it can be easily shown that, for a, b = 0, we

have
2

351

sin(b/N)
Hb (k)
1 ej N b
= ej N (ba)
=
(22)
2
j N a
Ha (k + )
sin(a/N)
1e
where  = (b a) is a shifting factor.
The key observation from (22) is that the ratio between
Ha (k) and Hb (k + ) is a constant which is independent of the
index k. Therefore, for this channel, it is sufficient to estimate
only one ICI gain vector, i.e. H1 . The other ICI gain vectors
can be obtained simply by constant scaling using (22).
This significantly reduces the complexity of the ICI gain
estimation, since the receiver now only needs to estimate one
ICI gain vector, instead of 2B vectors. The low complexity
IDDICI exploiting (22) is hereafter called LC-IDDICI.

For channels that can be approximated by a linear timevarying function, we have derived a constant scaling relation
between any two ICI gain vectors in (21). For d  N, it is
easy to show that,
Pd
sin2 (/N)
1
=
2
2
P1
sin (d/N)
d

(25)

where P1 can be derived from the following relation,

PICI = (1 P0 ) = P1

 1
2
2P1
2
6
d

(26)

|d|>0

where P0 is the power of the channel gain and is calculated

with (24). After a simple math manipulation, we have
3(1 P0 )
(27)
2
Lets assume an OFDM receiver with perfect 2B-tap
IDDICI, which can cancel all the ICI contributions from the
P1 =

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Fig. 3. Uncoded BER performance lower-bounds of DVB-T receivers with

LC-IDDICI.

empirical and semi-analytical lower bounds are very close

to each other. This suggests that the residual ICI can be
accurately modeled as an additional white Gaussian noise.
Furthermore, this demonstrates that, for this fd Ts value, the
LC-IDDICI can effectively remove the majority of the ICI
from the received signal.
Please note that the BER curves in Fig. 3 show the uncoded
BER at the input of the Viterbi decoder in the DVB-T
receiver. The uncoded performance is used because it provides
good insight on the ICI cancellation performance achieved
by IDDICI, without taking into account the different channel
decoder implementation. It is also easier to observe the error
floor caused by the residual ICI. The coded BER performance
follows the same trend as these uncoded curves.
C. Performance of IDDICI versus LC-IDDICI

2B neighboring subchannels. The residual ICI power after the

ICI cancellation can be calculated
 1

Pd = P1
(28)
Pres =
d2
|d|>B

|d|>B

B. Performance Lower Bound for DVB-T Receiver with

IDDICI/LC-IDDICI
Compared to a stationary OFDM receiver, the only difference for a mobile receiver with perfect IDDICI is the
additional noise from the residual ICI. Using (26), we can
now derive a BER performance lower bound for the mobile
receiver with IDDICI from the performance of a static OFDM
receiver using a combined numerical-analytical approach.
To obtain this lower bound, we first obtain the performance
of a static receiver in TU channel environment using a numerical approach with Matlab simulations. For a mobile receiver
with a specific fd Ts , the residual ICI is modeled as an additional AWGN noise, whose variance is calculated using (28).
A semi-analytical performance lower bound of the mobile
receiver with IDDICI is now derived from the performance of
the static OFDM receiver, corrupted with an AWGN noise with
a total variance of t2 = 02 + Pres , where 02 is the variance
of the thermal noise and Pres is the residual ICI power.
In Fig. 3, we plotted such derived performance lower-bound
in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER) before error correction
(uncoded BER) versus Eb /N0 for a DVB-T receiver with 4-tap,
10-tap and 20-tap IDDICI (i.e. with B = 2, 5 and 10 respectively). These lower-bound curves were obtained for a mobile
channel with fd Ts = 0.04, which corresponds to a receiver
speed of 60 km/h with the DVB-T system parameters specified before. The uncoded BER curve for the static receiver is
also shown as a reference. As compared to the performance
of the static receiver, which does not suffer a BER floor, the
mobile receiver shows an error floor at 4 103 , 2 103 and
103 for 4-tap, 10-tap and 20-tap LC-IDDICI respectively.
In Fig. 3, we also show two empirical lower-bound curves
of DVB-T receivers with 4-tap and 10-tap LC-IDDICI. The
empirical lower-bounds are obtained by running simulation over actual time-varying TU channels, assuming perfect
decision-feedbacks (i.e. Genie-Aided). It is shown that the

As mentioned in Section III-F, the LC-IDDICI is a suboptimal" alternative to IDDICI, since it is based on the assumption of linearly time-varying channel response. Therefore,
intuitively, the LC-IDDICI should suffer certain performance
degradation as compared to the IDDICI, as least in the ideal
case when the IDDICI can estimate the ICI gain vectors with
high accuracy.
In this section, we show that the LC-IDDICI actually
provides better performance than the IDDICI in practical
scenarios, where the ICI gain vector estimation is far from
perfect.
Lets consider an OFDM receiver with IDDICI with more
than three iterations. For the second and subsequent iterations,
the receiver can obtain more accurate LS estimate of the ICI
gain vectors, by using (19). Although the ICI gain estimates
from previous iteration contain errors, using (19) can remove
the majority of the ICI components. Assuming all the ICI components from the other (2B 1) neighboring subchannels are
completely removed by (19), for a 2B-tap IDDICI, it is easy
to show that the normalized mean square error (NMSE) of the
LS estimate of Hd is,
LS
=
d,norm

Pres + 02
d
=
Pd
Pd

(29)

A better estimate of Hd is then obtained by applying a

DFT-filtering to the LS estimate. With a window size of M
larger than the channel delay spread, the NMSE of the filtered
estimate is calculated as,
M LS
M Pres + 02
d,norm =
N
N
Pd
Using (22), it is easy to show that,
d,norm =

d,norm =

P1
1,norm d2 1,norm
Pd

(30)

(31)

Eq. (31) shows that for IDDICI, the NMSE of Hd estimate

is proportional to the average power of Hd . The estimate is
most reliable for H1 and less reliable for larger d values.
On the other hand, with LC-IDDICI, the receiver estimates
only H1 . This would generate the same NMSE as shown in
(30). The other ICI gain vectors are obtained by (22). For a
linearly time-varying channel response, where (22) is accurate,

ZHANG et al.: LOW-COMPLEXITY ROBUST OFDM RECEIVER FOR FAST FADING CHANNELS

353

Fig. 4.
Performance of DVB-T receiver with/without LC-IDDICI, four
iterations for 4-tap LC-IDDICI.

Fig. 5. Performance of DVB-T receivers versus convolutional code rate, four

iterations for 4-tap LC-IDDICI.

it is easy to prove that for any d value the Hd estimate has the
same NMSE as H1 , i.e., the estimates of the Hd vectors for
|d| > 1 have the same relative accuracy as H1 . In this case, as
compared to IDDICI, LC-IDDICI provides better estimation
on Hd vectors with |d| > 1.
Therefore, for most practical scenarios with fd Ts < 0.2
where the linear approximation is quite accurate, LC-IDDICI
generates more accurate estimates for Hd with |d| > 1, and
consequently provides better ICI cancellation performance.

speed, or by the highest speed the receivers can move with

the available SNR.
In Fig. 4, we plotted the required Eb /N0 values for DVBT receivers with: 1) pilot-aided (PA) channel estimation
(ChanEst-PA); 2) iterative decision-directed channel estimation (ChanEst-ICE); 3) conventional detection with perfect
channel state information (CSI) and perfect decision feedback,
i.e. Genie-Aided (ChanEst-PerfCSI-GA); 4) 4-tap LC-IDDICI,
(4T-ICI); 5) 4-tap LC-IDDICI, Genie-Aided (4T-ICI-GA); and
6) 4-tap LC-IDDICI, Genie-Aided, with perfect CSI (4T-ICIPerfCSI-GA).
Using the LC-IDDICI significantly improves the performance of DVB-T receivers moving at medium to high vehicle
speed. For Eb /N0 of 25 dB, with a 4-tap LC-IDDICI, the
DVB-T receiver can now achieve satisfactory performance for
speeds up to 150 km/h. This guarantees good service detection
for most vehicular receivers on highway or portable receivers
in vehicles. For a vehicle speed of 75 km/h, the use of 4tap LC-IDDICI provides a gain of 5.5 dB as compared to
conventional PA-based receivers without ICI cancellation.
Another observation from Fig. 4 is that the performance
of actual LC-IDDICI is very close to the performance upperbound, which is obtained assuming perfect decision-feedbacks.
The ultimate" upper-bound is achieved with LC-IDDICI
assuming perfect CSI, as well as the perfect decisionfeedbacks. It is shown that the speed limit of the actual
4-tap LC-IDDICI is about 20 km/h from this ultimate"
upper-bound. This suggests that better channel and ICI gain
estimation techniques could be used to further reduce this gap.
Currently, mobile reception of DVB-T signal is achieved
by deploying a specific DVB-T service using smaller constellation (16QAM) or stronger CC, i.e., rate-1/2 instead of
rate-2/3. This, however, sacrifices significant bandwidth efficiency. Furthermore, it requires the deployment of dedicated
channels for mobile receivers.
In Fig. 5, we show the performance of DVB-T receivers with
different channel estimation and ICI cancellation techniques for
different convolutional code rates. We consider a stronger code
rate of 1/2 and a weaker code rate of 3/4. With conventional
PA-based channel estimation, using a rate-1/2 CC provides good
service for receivers moving at speeds up to 135 km/h. This

D. Simulation Results
The robustness of a mobile DVB-T receiver in time-varying
channel is measured by the signal-to-noise ratio (Eb /N0 )
required to achieve the desired Quality of Service (QoS) versus receiver moving speed. For digital video and data services
with DVB-T, a commonly used criteria for good quality of service is a BER lower than 2 104 at the output of the Viterbi
decoder. This results in virtually error free" detection at the
output of the subsequent Reed-Solomon (RS) decoder [29].
In our simulation, each point on the performance curves is
obtained as an average over 10 independent channel realizations. For each channel realization, a test sequence of over
3 million information bits is processed. This amount of data
should provide good confidence interval for BER as low
as 105 for each channel realization. This guarantees high
reliability of the results for the target BER of 2 104 .
All performance curves are obtained using DFTfiltering [30] for both channel and ICI gain estimations,
due to its simplicity and excellent performance. To keep a
reasonable complexity, we consider at most four additional
iterations with an ICI canceller of less than ten taps. We
should also point out that using DFT-filtering for channel
estimation provides better performance than the simpler
channel interpolation techniques that are implemented in
many commercial DVB-T receivers.
The coverage area for mobile DVB-T receivers can be
derived from the performance curves and the link budget used
by the broadcasters, to determine the available SNR at the edge
of the planned coverage area. This coverage can be measured
either by the required SNR for receivers moving at certain

354

Fig. 6. Performance of LC-IDDICI versus number of ICI canceller taps,

four iterations.

guarantees good service detection for most vehicular receivers,

or portable receivers in vehicles. The speed limit is lowered
to 75 km/h for services with rate-2/3 CC. Some countries are
considering using a weaker CCs such as rate-3/4 to achieve
even better spectrum efficiency. This, however, lowers the service
availability of moving receivers to 60 km/h or lower.
With 4-tap LC-IDDICI, the speed limit for rate-1/2 CC is
improved to 250 km/h. This guarantees good service detection for receivers even on some high-speed trains. With the
weaker rate-3/4 CC, the LC-IDDICI extends the speed limit
from 60 to 105 km/h. This provides good performance for
vehicle receivers driving in urban areas.
In Fig. 6, we report the performance curves of a DVB-T
receiver using LC-IDDICI with different ICI canceller taps.
It is shown that the performance improves as the number of
ICI canceller taps increases. At Eb /N0 of 26 dB, an improvement in receiver mobility of 20 km/h is achieved by using
10-tap instead of 4-tap LC-IDDICI at the expense of higher
complexity.
In addition, Fig. 6 shows that the ultimate performance
upper bound for the 10-tap LC-IDDICI is 225 km/h, which
is significantly higher than the 170 km/h upper-bound for 4tap as shown in Fig. 4. For 10-tap LC-IDDICI, there is also a
larger gap between the simulation performance and the upperbound. This suggests that using better ICI gain estimation
technique could potentially achieve significant performance
improvement for LC-IDDICI with more taps.
Another performance-complexity trade-off for LC-IDDICI
is the number of iterations. For each additional iteration, the
receiver needs to repeat the channel and ICI gain estimation
process, as well as the signal detection (demodulation, deinterleaving, channel decoding). It is therefore desirable to
keep the number of iterations as low as possible.
In Fig. 7, we show the performance of a 4-tap LCIDDICI for varying number of iterations, for fd Ts = 0.1.
This corresponds to a vehicle speed of 150 km/h for an RF
frequency of 645 MHz. It is observed that the majority of
the performance improvement is achieved by the first iteration of LC-IDDICI. Additional iterations brings little or no
improvement. Therefore, only one iteration is sufficient for
practical implementation.

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BROADCASTING, VOL. 60, NO. 2, JUNE 2014

Fig. 7. Performance convergence of LC-IDDICI with number of iterations,

fd Ts = 0.1, 4-tap LC-IDDICI.

Fig. 8. Performance of DVB-T receiver with PA and 4-tap LC-IDDICI and

MRC, four iterations for 4-tap LC-IDDICI.

In Fig. 8, we show the performance of PA-based and LCIDDICI-based DVB-T receivers with two receive antennas using
maximum ratio combining (MRC). We consider DVB-T services
with high spectrum efficiency, i.e., 64QAM with rate-2/3 and
rate-3/4 CC. For PA-based receivers, using antenna diversity
provides good service detection for receivers moving at 135
and 165 km/h for rate-3/4 and 2/3 CCs respectively, improved
from 60 km/h and 75 km/h for receivers with single antenna.
By combining 4-tap LC-IDDICI with MRC, these speed limits
are further extended to 225 and 300 km/h respectively.
It is also shown that the performance of a PA-based and LCIDDICI-based receivers with MRC for rate-3/4 CC is close to
that of a single-antenna receiver for rate-1/2 CC. Therefore,
combining LC-IDDICI with MRC achieves 50% increase in
terms of the spectrum efficiency.
With rate-1/2 CC, PA-based and LC-IDDICI-based receivers
using MRC achieve mobility up to 210 km/h and 400 km/h
respectively. Therefore, combining LC-IDDICI with MRC
could potentially provide good DVB-T service detection for
receivers in high-speed trains, especially those DVB-T services
deployed in the lower-band of digital TV spectrum.
Implementing MRC at the receiver requires space to install
two independent antennas. This is not easy for small cellularlike hand-held devices. However, for vehicle receivers, it is

ZHANG et al.: LOW-COMPLEXITY ROBUST OFDM RECEIVER FOR FAST FADING CHANNELS

much easier to install multiple antennas on cars, buses, training

etc.. Even for tablet devices, todays small antenna technology
allows multiple antennas been installed, for reduced diversity
gain.

355

TABLE I
N UMBER OF C OMPLEX M ULTIPLICATIONS (CM) R EQUIRED BY
D IFFERENT M ODULES OF 4- TAP LC-IDDICI AND IMS-PSEICI, PER
S UBCARRIER PER OFDM S YMBOL

V. C OMPLEXITY A NALYSIS AND C OMPARISON WITH

E XISTING T ECHNIQUES
A. Complexity Analysis
For an OFDM receiver with LC-IDDICI, in addition to the
conventional signal detection, each iteration of the LC-IDDICI
algorithm requires the following computational complexity,
VIte = VDFGen + VConRx + (VChanEst + VICIEst + VICICan ) (32)
where VIte is the complexity for each additional iteration of
the LC-IDDICI. The other terms in (32) are:
VDFGen , the complexity to regenerate the decision feedbacks, including convolutional encoding, re-interleaving,
and QAM modulation;
VConRx , the complexity of conventional OFDM detection, including demodulation, de-interleaving and Viterbi
decoding;
VChanEst , the complexity of decision-directed channel
gain estimation, which in our implementation includes
one DFT-filtering process, i.e. log2 (N) complex multiplications (CM) operations, per subchannel, per OFDM
symbol, where N is the FFT length;
VICIEst , the complexity of decision-directed ICI gain
estimation, which in our implementation includes one
DFT-filtering process and NTap 1 vector complex
constant-scaling operations, requiring (log2 (N) + NTap )
CM operations, per subchannel, per OFDM symbol;
VICICan , the complexity for ICI cancellation, including
NTap CM operations, per subchannel, per OFDM symbol.
B. Comparison With Existing Techniques
In [16], an ICI cancellation technique, PSEICI, is proposed
based on power series expansion of the time-varying term of
the channel response. In PSEICI, the demodulated signal at
the receiver is expressed as,


(p) D H(p) X + N0
(33)
Y=
p=0

where H(p) is a vector containing the pth derivative of the

N subchannel responses, H(0) is the channel gain vector, and
(p) are constant matrices.
The original implementation of PSEICI requires very high
computational complexity because of the combined MMSE
estimation of H(p) vectors, including the channel gain vector
H(0) . A low complexity iterative decision-directed multi-stage
implementation, IMS-PSEICI, is proposed in [17], where the
receiver estimates the H(p) vectors separately. When using linear approximation of the time-varying channel response, the
IMS-PSEICI is further simplified because it estimates only
the first channel derivative, H(1) , in addition to the channel
gains, H(0) .

In IMS-PSEICI, the detection is performed as,

1 
 

new = D H(0)

Y (1) D H(1) X
X

(34)

In [17], the maximum achievable speed of a DVB-T receiver

with IMS-PSEICI is reported for 8k-mode with 64QAM and
rate-2/3 CC, in a TU channel at a carrier frequency of 625
MHz. The speed limit is about 80 km/h for a single-antenna
receiver and 130 km/h for a dual-antenna receiver using MRC.
In Fig. 4, it is shown that the 4-tap LC-IDDICI achieves
significantly better performance than IMS-PSEICI, achieving
maximum speed of 150 km/h for single antenna receiver in
the same channel condition. With dual-antenna MRC receiver,
our simulation results show a speed limit of 300 km/h for
LC-IDDICI.
In terms of implementation complexity, we make the following comparisons:
For LC-IDDICI, the LS estimate of H1 is obtained by
(10). For IMS-PSEICI, a matrix-vector multiplication is
required (Eq. (37) in [17]) to obtain the LS estimate of
H(1) . With the proposed efficient implementation in [17]
assuming linear time-varying channel response, this still
requires at least 4L CM operations per subcarrier, where
L = 64 is the delay spread of TU channel in terms of
DVB-T samples.
For LC-IDDICI, DFT-filtering is used to obtain a more
accurate estimtae of H1 from the LS estimate, which
requires one pair of FFT/IFFT, i.e. 13 complex multiplications (CMs) per subchannel. For IMS-PSEICI, this
is done by using SVD decomposition based Maximum
Likelihood (ML) algorithm, which requires more than L
CMs per subchannel, where L = 64 is the channel delay
spread.
ICI cancellation in LC-IDDICI requires 2B CMs per
subchannel using (18), which is 4 for the 4-tap LCIDDICI in our simulation; while for IMS-PSEICI, a
matrix-vector multiplication in (34) is needed. This multiplication can be performed efficiently by using a pair
of N-point FFT/IFFT operation, which requires 13 CMs
per subchannel.
For both techniques, it was shown that performance
convergence is achieved with at most two (2) iterations.
The above complexity comparison is summarized in Table I.
In conclusion, the LC-IDDICI provides much better performance at significantly lower complexity, as compared to
IMS-PSEICI.
Using linear approximation of the time-varying channel, we
further derived the following relationship between the first

356

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BROADCASTING, VOL. 60, NO. 2, JUNE 2014

off-diagonal vector H1 in LC-IDDICI and the first channel

derivative H(1) in IMS-PSEICI as,
H1 (k) = 1 H (1) (k)

(35)

where 1 is a constant.
It is interesting to note that although the signal model of
LC-IDDICI (Eq. (2)) and the signal model of IMS-PSEICI
(Eq. (33)) are very different, they are estimating a scaled
version of the same vector. From the simulation results and
complexity analysis, it is obvious that our signal model is
very significant as it leads to a more simple implementation
and better performance.
In [14], the receiver estimates the slope of the channel variation using the channel gain estimates of adjacent OFDM
symbols. To construct the CFRM, a matrix-vector multiplication in (33) is required. Secondly, detection is performed using
the MMSE solution [31], which has significantly higher complexity than the decision-directed ICI cancellation with one-tap
equalization. Therefore, this technique is not as practical as the
LC-IDDICI or IMS-PSEICI.
VI. C ONCLUSION
We proposed a low-complexity iterative channel estimation
and ICI cancellation technique, LC-IDDICI, for OFDM-based
wireless mobile communication systems, and demonstrated its
significance by applying it to a DVB-T receiver. For DVB-T
services deployed in 8k mode with 64QAM and rate-2/3
convolutional code, simulation results show that a DVB-T
receiver with LC-IDDICI could achieve good service detection
at vehicle speeds up to 150 km/h with one receive antenna,
as compared to the 80 km/h speed limitation for conventional receivers without ICI cancellation. This guarantees good
service availability for most vehicular receivers (or portable
receivers in vehicles). With two receive antennas and MRC,
good performance is achieved at speeds up to 300 km/h. It
is further shown that even with a weaker rate-3/4 CC, LCIDDICI makes it possible for fast moving receivers to achieve
good performance. This results in an 8% spectrum efficiency
increase as compared to using the rate-2/3 CC.
Furthermore, complexity analysis showed that the excellent
performance of LC-IDDICI is achieved with low additional
computational complexity, which is well within the capability
of todays VLSI technologies for consumer products.
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ZHANG et al.: LOW-COMPLEXITY ROBUST OFDM RECEIVER FOR FAST FADING CHANNELS

Liang Zhang received the bachelors degree in electronic engineering and information science from the
University of Science and Technology of China,
Hefei, China, in 1996, and the M.S. and Ph.D.
degrees in electrical and computer engineering from
the University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada,
in 1998 and 2002, respectively. He is a Research
Scientist with the Communications Research Centre
Canada (CRC), Ottawa, ON, Canada. He started
working with the Broadcast Technology Department,
at CRC, in 2001, and with the Wireless Technology
Research Branch in 2013. His major responsibilities include conducting
research in modern mobile communication systems and advanced receiver
technology prototyping. He is currently deeply involved in developing next
generation digital TV broadcasting standard ATSC3.0 system, as well as
advanced detection technologies and MIMO technologies for LTE and DTV
systems.

Zhihong Hong received the B.S. degree from

Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1994, and
the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from North Carolina
State University, Raleigh, NC, USA, all in electrical engineering, in 1998 and 2002, respectively. From 1999 to 2002, he was a Research
Assistant at the Center for Advanced Computing and
Communication, North Carolina State University.
From 2002 to 2003, he was with the University
of Wisconsin at Madison, Madison, WI, USA, as
a Post-Doctoral Research Associate. Since August
2003, he has been with the Communications Research Centre Canada, Ottawa,
ON, Canada. His research interests include advanced coding and modulation
in wireless communications.

Louis Thibault received the bachelors degree in

1976, and the masters degree in 1979, in electrical engineering from the University of Sherbrooke,
Sherbrooke, QC, Canada, where he worked as a
Research Engineer in speech coding for 2 years and
as a Consultant in applying microprocessors and
microelectronics technologies in the manufacturing
industry for 2 years. He then joined the Department
of Communications of the Canadian Government, in
1983, where he held positions in both the cable TV
planning and in the International Broadcast Planning
Groups. In 1988, he moved to the Communications Research Centre (CRC),
Ottawa, ON, Canada, where he has been working in the field of digital audio
broadcasting. His research areas include audio source coding, subjective evaluation of audio quality as well as channel coding, and modulation techniques
for broadband wireless transmission. Before he retired in 2013, he was the
Manager of the Advanced Audio Systems Group at the CRC.

357

Richard Boudreau received the M.A.Sc. degree

in electrical engineering from the University of
Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada, in 2002. He joined the
Communications Research Centre Canada, Ottawa,
ON, Canada, in 2000, where he was involved in the
development and implementation of software radio
for digital broadcasting applications. His research
interests include wireless communications, time and
frequency synchronization techniques, and real-time
systems development.

Yiyan Wu received the M.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees

in electrical engineering from Carleton University,
Ottawa, ON, Canada, in 1986 and 1990, respectively.
After graduation, he worked at Telesat Canada as a
Senior Satellite Communication Systems Engineer.
In 1992, he joined the Communications Research
Centre Canada, Ottawa, ON, Canada, and is currently a Principle Research Scientist. His research
interests include broadband multimedia communications, digital broadcasting, and communication
systems engineering. He is a fellow of the Canadian
Academy of Engineering, and an Adjunct Professor of Carleton University,
Ottawa, ON, Canada. He is a member of the IEEE Broadcast Technology
Society Administrative Committee, and a member of the ATSC Board
of Directors, representing IEEE. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE
T RANSACTIONS ON B ROADCASTING. He has over 300 publications and has
received several technical awards for his contribution to the research and
development of digital broadcasting and broadband multimedia communications.