Coherent Detection of Turbo-Coded OFDM Signals Transmitted Through Frequency Selective Rayleigh Fading Channels with Receiver Diversity and Increased Throughput

In this work, we discuss techniques for coherently detecting turbo coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexed (OFDM) signals, transmitted through frequency selective Rayleigh (the magnitude of each channel tap is Rayleigh distributed) fading channels having a uniform power delay profile. The channel output is further distorted by a carrier frequency and phase offset, besides additive white Gaussian noise. A new frame structure for OFDM, consisting of a known preamble, cyclic prefix, data and known postamble is proposed, which has a higher throughput compared to the earlier work. A robust turbo decoder is proposed, which functions effectively over a wide range of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Simulation results show that it is possible to achieve a bit-error-rate (BER) of $$10^{-5}$$10-5 at an SNR per bit as low as 8 dB and throughput of 82.84 %, using a single transmit and two receive antennas. We also demonstrate that the practical coherent receiver requires just about 1 dB more power compared to that of an ideal coherent receiver, to attain a BER of $$10^{-5}$$10-5. The key contribution to the good performance of the practical coherent receiver is due to the use of a long preamble (512 QPSK symbols), which is perhaps not specified in any of the current wireless communication standards. We have also shown from computer simulations that, it is possible to obtain even better BER performance, using a better code. A simple and approximate Cramér–Rao bound on the variance of the frequency offset estimation error for coherent detection, is derived. The proposed algorithms are well suited for implementation on a DSP-platform.