Ov-OFDM: A reduced PAPR and cyclic prefix free multicarrier transmission system

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) enables high data rate transmissions over frequency selective fading channels. Its beneficial qualities are a low implementation complexity and the possible application of power loading schemes to increase data throughput. Drawbacks of OFDM are the requirement for a cyclic prefix (CP) to avoid interference between OFDM symbols and the high peak to average power ratio (PAPR). The CP causes transmission overhead and hence reduces throughput, while a high PAPR requires the use of less efficient linear amplifiers. The CP overhead can be reduced by increasing the OFDM symbol length, which will, however, increase processing delay and PAPR. In conventional OFDM the symbol length directly determines PAPR and transmission overhead. In this paper we use a CP free OFDM transmission system that allows shortening the OFDM symbol length to reduce the maximum PAPR without transmission overhead trade-off. The proposed system, called Ov-OFDM, is based on overlapping MMSE frequency domain equalization to remove interference between OFDM symbols.