Low Complexity Discrete Hartley Transform Precoded OFDM System over Frequency-Selective Fading Channel

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) suffers from spectral nulls of frequency-selective fading channels. Linear precoded (LP-) OFDM is an effective method that guarantees symbol detectability by spreading the frequency-domain symbols over the whole spectrum. This paper proposes a computationally efficient and low-cost implementation for discrete Hartley transform (DHT) precoded OFDM systems. Compared to conventional DHT-OFDM systems, at the transmitter, both the DHT and the inverse discrete Fourier transform are replaced by a one-level butterfly structure that involves only one addition per symbol to generate the time-domain DHT-OFDM signal. At the receiver, only the DHT is required to recover the distorted signal with a single-tap equalizer in contrast to both the DHT and the DFT in the conventional DHT-OFDM. Theoretical analysis of DHT-OFDM with linear equalizers is presented and confirmed by numerical simulation. It is shown that the proposed DHT-OFDM system achieves similar performance when compared to other LP-OFDMs but exhibits a lower implementation complexity and peak-to-average power ratio.