system with linear-phase

transmultiplexer
Seog Geun Kang and Eon Kyeong Joo
An orthogonal frequency division multiplexing system with a
linear-phase transmultiplexer is presented. The proposed system
has much lower sidelobe power and better subband isolation
characteristics than the conventional system. In addition, the
proposed system shows an improved error performance, especially
at low SNR.

Introduction: In an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing

(OFDM) system, the inverse discrete Fourier transform (IDFT) is

employed to modulate a block of parallelised complex signals at
the transmitter. In addition, DFT is used to separate each subband signal from the received symbol. To maintain the orthogonality among subband signals and to meet the requirement of the
Nyquist property, systems in general have employed rectangular
filters as prototype filters [l]. As a result, each subband has a significant spectral overlap with its neighbouring subbands.
To deal with this problem, an OFDM system which is designed
with a linear-phase transmultiplexer is presented in this Letter.
According to the McClellan-Parks algorithm [2], a linear-phase
paraunitary filter has been designed and employed as a prototype
fdter. The synthesis and analysis filter banks of the transmultiplexer have been designed using cosine modulation of the prototype. As a result, the peak power of the first sidelobe of the
presented prototype filter is lower than that of the rectangular fdter by
15dB. Also, the presented OFDM system shows a
reduced bit error rate (BER) especially at low signal-to-noise ratio
(SNR), as compared to the conventional system in an additive
white Gaussian noise (AWGN) environment.

Design with transmultiplexer: A general multichannel filter bank is

constructed using two types of filter; synthesis fdters, g,, and analysis fdters, h,, 0 5 k 5 M - 1. Each filter is usually implemented
with cosine modulation of a linear-phase lowpass prototype fdter,
p(n), as follows:

k=O

where Y(z) is the z-transform of y(n). Gk(z) and X,(z") represent

the frequency responses of the Mh synthesis filter and interpolated
signal, respectively.
A parallel structure of separation fdters in the receiver should
ensure that each recovered signal depends only on its corresponding input. Let h(n)=[h,(n), h,(n), ..., hM.,(n)] be the impulse
response of the analysis filter bank. The composite signal, ~ ( n )is,
fed into M analysis filters and produces i;(n)=[;,(n), G1(n), ...,
iM-l(n)],where ;,(n)=h,(n)*y(n). Thus, the overall transfer function is

Fk,(z) = Z-(~-~)G~(Z'/~W~)H~(Z~/~W')~-("-"
(4)
for 0 I
k, i I M - 1. In the case of k # i in eqn. 4, F,,(z)may be
thought of as interchannel interferenceYCI) which is the influence
of the undesired input signal X;(z) on X,(z). IC1 can be eliminated
when each output signal depends only on its corresponding input
signal. Owing to the orthogonality between the synthesis and analysis fdters in eqns. 1 and 2, Fkr(z)= 0 for k # i and the transfer
characteristic of the presented OFDM system are

FTMUX= HTG = diag[Q,cl,..., C M - ~ ] Z - ( " - ' )

(5)

where c, = l/M Z k 1 G,(z~/~W)H,~(Z~/~W)

is an arbitrary constant and diag[c,, c1, .-,cM-,]represents an M x M diagonal matrix.
Thus, the recovered signal of the kth path can be represented as a
scaled and delayed version of the input signal and is given as follows:

+ 0 5 ) (n - -

;(

2 p ( n ) COS -(k

hk(n)

Each parallelised signal is interpolated and fdtered independently to produce a composite signal, y(n). The synthesis fdter
bank, g(n)=k,(n),gl(n), ..., gM-,(n)],allocates each input signal to a
different frequency band by selecting a set of M centre frequencies. Thus, the frequency response of a transmitted signal can be
represented as

'

Y ) + @ k )

where N is the length of a filter and O,=(-l)W4.

The structure of a transmultiplexer allows the composition multitude of data at the transmitter and the decomposition of the data
at the receiver [3]. Such a multiple-input and output structure and
the operation of the fdter banks can be well adapted to the
OFDM system. In Fig. 1, an OFDM system which is designed
with a transmultiplexer is depicted, where S/P and P/S denote a
serial to parallel and parallel to serial converter, respectively. JM
represents an M-fold downsampler, and 1'M an upsampler.

normalisedfrequency

Fig. 2 Frequency characteristics of prototype filters

- - _ _ rectangular filter
paraunitary filter

Table 1: Coefficients for prototype fdter

4ho(n)
4

$13'~)

.---

hl(n)

'--+

hM-l (n)

1292

P/s

W
W

signal
,
mapper -+x(n)

&-,
m-*

(n)

ELECTRONICS LETTERS

25th June 1998

Vol. 34

No. 13

Performance analysis: To evaluate the performance of the pro-

posed system, computer simulations for an OFDM system with a

16-channel transmultiplexer have been performed. A square 16QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) constellation has been
used as a signal mapper, and a linear-phase lowpass prototype filter of length N = 32 has been designed using the McClellan-Parks
algorithm [2]. The coefficients of the filter are shown in Table 1,
where p(N - 1 - n) = p(n) for 0 5 n < Ni2. Frequency characteristics of the prototype and rectangular filter are shown in Fig. 2.
The peak power of the first sidelobe of the rectangular fiter is
lower by 13.ldB than that of the main lobe. In comparison, the
difference in the paraunitary prototype filter is 28.5dB. In addition, the latter has a much lower normalised power in all sidelobes
than does the rectangular filter. The influence of spectral overlap,
therefore, can be much more severe in the rectangular filter bank
than in the transmultiplexer. Thus, the paraunitary filter bank is
expected to be more robust to ICI. The error performance of
OFDM systems in an AWGN channel are depicted in Fig. 3.

MCCLELLAN, J.H., PARKS, T.w., and RABINER, L.R.: A computer

program for designing optimum FIR linear phase digital filters,
IEEE Trans. Signal Process., 1973, SP-21, (6), pp. 506-526

VAIDYANATHAN, P.P.:

Multirate systems and filter banks (PrenticeHall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1993)

Reuse efficiency for non-uniform traffic

distributions in CDMA systems
C.K. dAvila and M.D. Yacoub
An exact and simple method to evaluate the frequency reuse
efficiency for the reverse link of cellular CDMA systems over a
non-uniform traffc distribution is presented. This method is

based on a traffic redistribution and decomposition process and

on standard curves with whch partial reuse effciencies are
obtained and conveniently added to give the fmal parameter.
Introduction: The frequency reuse efficiency F indicates the capac-

ity reduction of a multiple cell system as compared to a one-cell

network, and can be estimated for a given cell j as

where N is the number of cells within the system and k, is the

interference factor of cell i measured at cellj. The parameter k,can
be calculated as a function of the propagation conditions and traffic density as

k=

-81
1

3
Eb/N,,dB

Fig. 3 Bit error rates of OFDM systems

0 conventional system

0 proposed system

When the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is > 5.5dB, the BERs of

both systems are almost the same. The BER of the proposed system, however, is much lower than that of the conventional system
for low E,IN,. Owing to ICI, the performance of the conventional
system is believed to be seriously degraded at low values of SNR,
where the effect of noise is relatively large.
Conclusions: Owing to the significant spectral overlap of the rectangular filter bank, the orthogonality of the conventional OFDM
system can hardly be maintained in noisy channels. As compared
to that, the paraunitary prototype filter shows a much lower
sidelobe power and better subband isolation characteristics than
the conventional rectangular fdter bank. In addition, the presented
OFDM system shows improved error performance especially at
low SNR as compared to the conventional system in an AWGN
environment.

0 IEE 1998
20 April 1998
Electronics Letters Online No: 19980911
Seog Geun Kang and Eon Kyeong Joo (School of Electronic and
Electrical Engineering, Kyungpook National University, Taegu, 702-701,
Korea)
Corresponding author: Eon Kyeong Joo
E-mail: ekjoo@ee.kyungpook.ac.kr

Ls

C(Ts/Tt)yp(x,Y) d A

(2)

where r, is the distance from the interfering mobile to its serving

base station, r, is the distance from this mobile to the target (interfered) base station, y is the path loss exponent, p(xy) is the traffic
density as a function of the positional variables (x,y),A, is the
integration area of cell i, dA is the infinitesimal area, and C is a
constant which includes the mobile transmitted power, the voice
activity factor, and other factors.
The frequency reuse efficiency has a direct impact on both the
capacity and the radio coverage prediction of a CDMA system.
An accurate estimation of such a parameter, therefore, is of paramount importance in cellular system design. On the other hand,
this parameter varies substantially according to each particular
propagation condition and also with the traffk distribution. Its
precise estimation is rather intricate and it is usually attained by
means of long and time consuming processes, such as complex
numerical integration [l] or Monte Carlo simulation [2]. As a consequence, in practice, planning and design generally make use of
typical values (assumed 0.65 [3], for instance), obtained for the
uniform traffic distribution case.
This Letter proposes an exact and simple method to compute F
for any traffic distribution. The overall procedure comprises four
steps: (i) traffic redistribution process (TRP), (ii) traffic decomposition process (TDP), (iii) partial evaluation process (PEP), and
(iv) final evaluation process (FEP). These steps are detailed below.
Traffic redistribution process: For a given target cell j , the traffic of
the cells in each tier surrounding cell j is redistributed all around
this cell within the respective tier so that cellj becomes the central
cell of the system. The only constraint for this redistribution is
that the sum of the traffic of each tier must be unaltered. This step
is obviously unnecessary if the target cell is the central cell of the
original system.
Traffic decomposition process: Assume that, in an N-cell system, a
non-uniform traffc distribution p(x,y) can be written as
N

References
1

P ( S , Y)

Comparison of DFT
and cosine modulated filter banks in multicarrier modulation.
RIZOS, A.D., PROAKIS, J.G.,

and

NGUYEN, T.Q.:

Proc. IEEE Globecom94, San Francisco, November 1994, Vol. 2,

pp. 687-691

ELECTRONICS LETTERS

25th June 1998

Vol. 34

P d Z ( G Y)

(3)

2=1

where pt is the mean traffic density of cell i and S,(x,y) = 1 for

(x,y)c A, and S,(x,y) = 0, otherwise. We define pmin= min{pz}, i =
1, 2, ..., Nand N,,, as the number of cells with p, = pmin.For each

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