Abstract—For orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing latest broadcasting and WiMAX standards, and any additional
(OFDM) systems equipped with multiple receive antennas, DFT block will remarkably increase the computational com-
conventional pre-discrete Fourier transform (DFT) combining plexity. Pre-DFT combining was then proposed for complexity
cannot balance the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) performance of
all subcarriers. This degrades the whole system performance. In reduction [2]–[5]. Usually, only one DFT block is required.
this paper, we propose the use of the max-min fair criterion for This saving is very significant, particularly when the number
pre-DFT combining to solve the problem. Semidefinite relaxation of receive antennas and the number of subcarriers are large.
(SDR) is employed to approximate the solution. We also present Conventional pre-DFT combining is set to maximize the sum
a simple way to effectively reduce the amount of computation of the output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values achieved in
without sacrificing much of the performance. Simulation results
show that, for both uncoded and coded OFDM systems, the all subcarriers before detection. For easy reference, we call
proposed max-min fair pre-DFT combining solved via SDR can this criterion as maximizing the overall output SNR in the
outperform conventional pre-DFT combining under various following. The disadvantage of it is that the SNR performance
multipath channel environments with affordable computational of different subcarriers is often not balanced. The high error
complexity. rate recorded in some subcarriers causes a bottleneck, which
Index Terms—Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing will unavoidably degrade the whole system performance.
(OFDM), pre-discrete Fourier transform (DFT) combining, In this paper, we propose the use of the max-min fair
semidefinite programming, semidefinite relaxation (SDR). criterion, which is nondeterministic polynomial-time hard
(NP-hard) in nature, for pre-DFT combining. Fortunately, this
I. I NTRODUCTION criterion can be reformulated to allow the application of semi-
definite relaxation (SDR) [6] and, thus, can accurately and
O RTHOGONAL frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM)
is an effective technology for robust and reliable high-rate
transmission in next-generation wireless communication sys-
efficiently be approximated in polynomial time [7]. This en-
sures satisfactory SNR performance for the bad subcarriers,
tems [1]. It transforms a frequency-selective fading channel into and the total error rate can substantially be improved. To take
parallel flat-fading subchannels, thereby mitigating the effect of one step further, we present a simple way to effectively reduce
intersymbol interference and reducing the receiver complexity the amount of computation without sacrificing much of the
in both the equalization and symbol-decoding stages. As a performance. Simulation results show that, for both uncoded
result, OFDM has recently received much attention in digital and coded (convolutionally coded with hard-decision decoding)
video/audio broadcasting, wireless local area networks (IEEE OFDM systems, the proposed max-min fair pre-DFT combin-
802.11a/g/n standards), broadband wireless access (BWA) ing solved via SDR can perform better than conventional pre-
(IEEE 802.16e standard, which is also known as WiMAX), DFT combining under various multipath channel environments
mobile BWA (IEEE 802.20 standard), fourth-generation mobile with affordable computational complexity.
communication systems, etc. Throughout this paper, we use bold letters, bold letters with
It is known that the use of multiple receive antennas an overbar, lower case letters, and upper case letters to denote
for OFDM signal reception can improve the link quality. vectors, matrices, time-domain signals, and frequency-domain
Subcarrier-based maximum ratio combining (MRC) gives ex- signals, respectively.
cellent performance; however, it requires high computational
complexity since one discrete Fourier transform (DFT) block II. S YSTEM D ESCRIPTION
for each receive antenna is needed to fully exploit the advantage
of spatial diversity. In modern OFDM applications, the number We consider an OFDM system with one transmit antenna
of subcarriers is up to several thousands, as reported in the and M receive antennas. Define an N × 1 complex signal
vector S(k) = [ S(kN ) S(kN + 1) · · · S(kN + N − 1) ]T
as the kth OFDM data block (in the frequency domain) to be
Manuscript received January 16, 2008; revised June 11, 2008. First published transmitted, where N is the number of subcarriers. This data
August 12, 2008; current version published April 22, 2009. This work was
supported by the National Science Council, Taiwan, under Grant NSC 96-2221- block is first modulated by inverse DFT (IDFT). With matrix
E-260-003. The review of this paper was coordinated by Dr. Y.-C. Liang. representation, we can write the output of the IDFT (in the time
The author is with the Graduate Institute of Communication Engineer- domain) as
ing, National Chi Nan University, Puli 54561, Taiwan (e-mail: ymlee@
ncnu.edu.tw).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online s(k) = [ s(kN ) s(kN + 1) ··· s(kN + N − 1) ]T
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TVT.2008.2003445 = F̄H S(k) (1)
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1742 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 58, NO. 4, MAY 2009
where |γn w|2 indicates the signal power of the nth subcarrier
where diag{·} represents a diagonal matrix with the main after diversity combining. The idea behind this criterion is
diagonal being the included vector, and Nm (k) is an N × 1 to optimize the SNR performance of the worst subcarrier. It
complex Gaussian noise vector with zero mean and equal vari- essentially rectifies the fairness problem in conventional pre-
ance for each element. Similarly, we can collect the M received DFT combining. In this way, the signal strength of the worst
signal vectors and form an N × M received signal matrix as subcarrier will not be too low in most circumstances. The SNR
loss in the bad subcarriers will be reduced, and thus, the perfor-
R̄(k) = [ R0 (k) R1 (k) ··· RM −1 (k) ] . (4) mance bottleneck for OFDM systems will be removed. On the
one hand, it is intuitively true that the max-min fair criterion is
To optimize the detection performance, subcarrier-based MRC an appropriate objective for uncoded OFDM systems. On the
can be used to combine the signals from different receive other hand, we will empirically show in Section V that this
antennas [different columns in R̄(k)] for each subcarrier criterion can also enhance the error-probability performance
[each row in R̄(k)]. Since M DFT blocks are required for when coding and interleaving are employed across the whole
processing the M received signal vectors, the computational OFDM data block for error protection.
complexity will be prohibitively high when both M and N Unfortunately, this max-min fair criterion is known to be
increase. As an alternative, we consider pre-DFT combining. NP-hard. Inspired by [6], we can recast the optimization prob-
Fig. 1 shows the block diagram of a simplified OFDM receiver lem in (6) as
performing pre-DFT combining. We see that the combining
operation is achieved in the time domain. Only one DFT block max min trace(Γn W)
W n
is necessary in between, and the number of weights needed subject to trace(W) = 1 rank(W) = 1, W 0 (7)
to be found is equal to the number of receive antennas. Let
w = [ w0 w1 · · · wM −1 ]T be an M × 1 weight vector where Γn = γnH γn , W is an M × M matrix to be deter-
for diversity combining. With reference to (3) and (4), the mined, and the inequality W 0 means that W is symmetric
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LEE: MAX-MIN FAIR PRE-DFT COMBINING FOR OFDM SYSTEMS WITH MULTIPLE RECEIVE ANTENNAS 1743
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1744 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 58, NO. 4, MAY 2009
Fig. 2. Uncoded BER performance for different combining schemes with Fig. 4. Uncoded BER performance for different combining schemes with
channel length L = 2. channel length L = 6.
Fig. 3. Coded BER performance for different combining schemes with Fig. 5. Coded BER performance for different combining schemes with
channel length L = 2. channel length L = 6.
set as N = 64, and the length of CP is set as Lcp = 16. The in BER while utilizing multiple receive antennas. Subcarrier-
multipath channels for different receive antennas and the corre- based MRC gives the best performance at the expense of higher
sponding channel coefficients are all independently generated computational complexity, and the proposed max-min via SDR
according to Rayleigh fading. We examine the performance of significantly outperforms conventional pre-DFT combining
both the uncoded and coded systems. For the coded OFDM, from moderate- to high-SNR regions in both cases. The BER
a convolutional code with code rate 2/3 is used for error performance of the proposed max-min via SDR with Nu =
protection. A random interleaver is applied to the whole OFDM N = 64 can be quite close to that of subcarrier-based MRC. As
data block. At the receiver, the Viterbi algorithm with hard the value of Nu decreases, the BER of the proposed max-min
decision and a constraint length of 8 is used for decoding. To via SDR increases. We observe that, when Nu is equal to 16
gain much insight into the tradeoff between performance and or 8, the performance loss is negligibly small. Moreover, even
complexity for the proposed max-min via SDR, we evaluate with Nu = 2, i.e., only two subcarriers are used for the SDR
its performance with different values of Nu in the follow- calculation, its BER performance is still better than that of con-
ing. For comparison, we also consider the detection with a ventional pre-DFT combining when the SNR is larger than 0 dB
single receive antenna, conventional pre-DFT combining, and for the uncoded case and larger than 6 dB for the coded case.
subcarrier-based MRC with the same settings. After that, we repeat the same experiment for the scenario
Figs. 2 and 3 show the bit error rate (BER) performance of longer channel length, i.e., L = 6. The BER performance
for the uncoded and coded OFDM systems, respectively. The is shown in Figs. 4 and 5 for the uncoded and coded systems,
length of the multipath channels in these cases is L = 2. From respectively. We observe the same trend in the figures. Although
these two figures, we see that there is always some improvement the performance gap between the max-min via SDR and the
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LEE: MAX-MIN FAIR PRE-DFT COMBINING FOR OFDM SYSTEMS WITH MULTIPLE RECEIVE ANTENNAS 1745
subcarrier-based MRC becomes larger, the proposed scheme [4] M. Budsabathon, Y. Hara, and S. Hara, “Optimum beamforming for
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VI. C ONCLUSION [7] S. Boyd and L. Vandenberghe, Convex Optimization. Cambridge, U.K.:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004.
In this paper, we have developed the max-min fair criterion [8] J. F. Sturm, “Using Sedumi 1.02, a MATLAB toolbox for optimization over
for pre-DFT combining. The max-min solution is approxi- symmetric cones,” Optim. Methods Softw., vol. 11/12, pp. 625–653, 1999.
mated through SDR and solved with affordable computational [9] L. N. Trefethen and D. Bau, III, Numerical Linear Algebra. Philadelphia,
PA: SIAM, 1997.
complexity. Based on extensive simulations, we conclude that
the proposed max-min via SDR scheme can improve the
error-probability performance of pre-DFT combining and pro-
vide a good tradeoff between performance and computational
complexity.
Yinman Lee (M’06) was born in Hong Kong. He
R EFERENCES received the Ph.D. degree from the Department of
Communication Engineering, National Chiao Tung
[1] R. Van Nee and R. Prasad, OFDM for Wireless Multimedia Communica-
University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, in 2006.
tions. Norwood, MA: Artech House, 2000.
Since 2006, he has been with the Graduate
[2] M. Okada and S. Komaki, “Pre-DFT combining space diversity assisted
Institute of Communication Engineering, National
COFDM,” IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol., vol. 50, no. 2, pp. 487–496,
Chi Nan University, Puli, Taiwan, as an Assistant
Mar. 2001.
Professor. His research interests include adaptive sig-
[3] D. Bartolomé and A. I. Pérez-Neira, “MMSE techniques for space diversity
nal processing, wireless communications, and multi-
receivers in OFDM-based wireless LANs,” IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun.,
ple antenna systems.
vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 151–160, Feb. 2003.
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