IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 7, NO. 7, JULY 2008 1
Coherent and Differential ICI Cancellation for Mobile OFDM with
Application to DVB-H
Sili Lu, Student Member, IEEE and Naofal Al-Dhahir, Fellow, IEEE
Abstract—We develop a reduced-complexity hybrid
frequency/time-domain orthogonal frequency division
multiplexing (OFDM) channel estimation algorithm for
high-mobility scenarios where the channel varies significantly
within each OFDM block, resulting in severe intercarrier
interference (ICI). The algorithm exploits the banded and
symmetric structure of the channel matrix in the frequency-
domain and its sparse structure in the time-domain to achieve
significant complexity reductions, which we quantify for
the Digital Video Broadcasting-Handheld (DVB-H) system.
Furthermore, we compare coherent and differential mobile
OFDM detection for DVB-H.
Index Terms—ICI mitigation, OFDM, channel estimation,
doppler shift
I. INTRODUCTION
S
UPPORTING high mobility is a key requirement for
a number of OFDM-based broadband wireless systems,
such as DVB-H[1]. For high-mobility systems, the fast channel
variations within one OFDM block destroy the orthogonal-
ity between subcarriers resulting in ICI proportional to the
Doppler frequency. This problem is even more severe for the
DVB-H 8K mode (which uses a large number o f 8192 densely-
spaced subcarriers) and becomes a significant challenge for
receiver reliability at highway and train speeds.
To mitigate ICI, several techniques have been proposed in
the literature including linear minimum mean sq uare error
(MMSE) equalizers [2] [3], successive interference cancella-
tion [4], basis expansion models (BEM) [5] and time-domain
block filtering [6]. Our objective in this paper is to investigate
low-complexity schemes that can suppress ICI effectively
under high-mobility conditions. As a case study, we focus
on the challenging DVB-H application where the number of
subcarriers is very large (2048, 4096, or 8192) [7], hence
it is critical to develop a low-comp lexity ICI cancellation
solution due to the power/size constraints at the user terminal.
One such scheme is the finite impluse response (FIR) MMSE
frequency-domain equalizer (FEQ) in [8] which is based on
the well-known banded structure of the channel matrix in
the frequency-domain [9][10], and has only few taps per
subcarrier. Nevertheless, all of these approaches are coherent
detection schemes that require reliable channe l estimation at
the receiver wh ich is a cha llenging task at high mobility.
Channel estimation for OFDM can be performed in the
frequency domain or time domain. Conventional frequency-
domain channel estimation algorithms ignore ICI which makes
Manuscript received June 4, 2007; revised September 17, 2007, November
8 2007 and November 25, 2007; accepted December 3, 2007. The associate
editor coordinating the review of this letter and approving it for publication
was Dr. R. Mallik.
This work was supported in part by Semiconductor Research Corporation
under contract No. 2005-HJ-1328 and by a gift from Texas Instruments Inc.
The authors are with University of Texas at Dallas, (e-mail: {sxl059000,
aldhahir}@utdallas.edu)
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TWC.2008.070591.
them highly suboptimal under high Doppler. Time-domain
channel estimation algorithms (such as [6]) typically mark
a few rows of the time-domain channel matrix and estimate
them using pilot tones embedded within each OFDM block.
Since the multipath delay spread can be very high for single
frequency network (SFN) DVB systems [1] [7], the number
of unknown channel taps for each marker row can be too
high to estimate with the limited number of available pilots.
Considering a fast-varying channel, Mostofi et al. proposed
in [11] a hybrid frequency/time-domain channel estimation
algorithm based on a linear approximation of the channel time
variations within one OFDM block.
As a low-complexity alternative transceiver structure, we
also investigate and compare the performance of differential
OFDM detection with coherent OFDM detection for the DVB-
H system. Note that differential detection is already used in the
digital audio broadcasting (DAB) standard. Since differential
detection does not require channel estimation, pilot overhead
can be reduced to increase data throughput and channel esti-
mation co mplexity can be eliminated from the user terminal.
Our main contributions in this paper can be summarized as
follows
• We show how to significantly reduce the complexity
of the hybrid frequency/time-domain channel estimation
algorithm in [11] by exploiting the channel’s sparse and
banded structure. We quantify these complexity savings
through a detailed complexity analysis for the DVB-H
system.
• We derive a new asymptotic relationship between the sub-
and super-diagonals of the frequency-domain channel
matrix and exploit it to further reduce the complexity
of channel estimation and to design an ICI-mitigating
pilot/data placement scheme.
• We investigate differential OFDM detection in the pres-
ence of ICI and compare its performance with coherent
detection for the DVB-H system.
Notation: We use (·)
T
to denote the transpose, (·)
∗
the
complex-conjugate, (·)
H
the complex-conjugate transpose, ·
the floor operation and (·)
N
the modulo-N operation. G
i,j
denotes the element in the i-th row and j-th column of matrix
G, where row/column indices begin with zero. The estimated
value of random variable a is denoted by ˆa and I
N
denotes
the N × N identity matrix. We use the notation of G(:,j) to
denote the j-th column of G.
II. M
OBILE OFDM SYSTEM MODEL
We consider an OFDM system with N subcarriers where
each OFDM block, denoted by X =[X
0
...X
N−1
]
T
,is
converted into time-domain samples x =[x
0
...x
N−1
]
T
using
the N -point Inverse Fast Fourier Transform (IFFT) operation
x = F
H
X where F
H
is the N-point IFFT matrix. We assume
1536-1276/08$25.00
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2008 IEEE