IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 59, NO.

2, FEBRUARY 2011

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Per Sub-Block Equalization of Very Long OFDM Blocks in Mobile Communications

Paolo Baracca, Stefano Tomasin, Member, IEEE, Lorenzo Vangelista, Senior Member, IEEE, Nevio Benvenuto, Senior Member, IEEE, and Alberto Morello, Member, IEEE

AbstractIn orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) communication systems mobility results in timevariations of the channel, which yield intercarrier interference (ICI), especially when large OFDM blocks are employed in order to achieve a high spectral efciency. In this letter we focus on systems with very long OFDM blocks, where many of the existing ICI mitigation techniques can not be applied due to complexity constraints. To mitigate ICI we propose a pre-equalizer, operating on sub-blocks of the received OFDM block, whose aim is to force all sub-blocks to have almost the same equivalent channel. In other words, the pre-equalizer combats only time variations of the channel. Next, after OFDM demodulation, the classical equalizer compensates frequency selectivity of the target channel. Performance of the proposed scheme, together with a suitable channel estimate implemented on a per sub-block basis, is evaluated for a digital video broadcasting scenario, according to the DVB-T2 standard, where the OFDM block size may be 32k, and its possible extension to hand-held devices in a nextgeneration DVB-H. Index TermsDigital TV, equalizers, mobile communications.

I. I NTRODUCTION RTHOGONAL frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is an important modulation scheme for high bit-rate applications like digital video broadcasting (DVB) since it avoids intersymbol interference using a guard interval (GI) and mitigates frequency selectivity of multipath channels with a simple one-tap equalizer (i.e. one coefcient per subcarrier). While GIs compensate time dispersion, they also reduce throughput and therefore new standards appearing in the recent years propose very long OFDM blocks to increase efciency (up to 32k subcarriers in DVB-T2 [1]). However, long blocks are more vulnerable to time-variations of the channel, which in high-mobility scenarios destroy orthogonality among subcarriers, resulting in intercarrier interference (ICI). Several techniques have been studied in literature to mitigate ICI. In [3] a self-cancellation scheme is proposed where the
Paper approved by C.-L. Wang, the Editor for Equalization of the IEEE Communications Society. Manuscript received November 25, 2009; revised April 2, 2010 and July 6, 2010. Part of this work has been presented at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) 2009, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and at the International Conference on Ultra Modern Telecommunications (ICUMT) 2009, St. Petersburg, Russia. P. Baracca, S. Tomasin, L. Vangelista and N. Benvenuto are with the Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova, via Gradenigo 6/B, 35131, Padova, Italy (e-mail: {baraccap, tomasin, vangelista, nb}@dei.unipd.it). A. Morello is with the Research and Technology Innovation Centre, RAI, 10135, Torino, Italy (e-mail: a.morello@rai.it). Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TCOMM.2011.121410.090252

same data symbol is transmitted on a group of neighbor subcarriers. Although this allows a reduction of ICI, spectral efciency is signicantly reduced. In [4], [5], [6] and [7] linear equalizers, implemented as lters or matrix operations after OFDM demodulation, have been proposed. These approaches are suited for moderate speeds, while channel estimation and computational complexity become an issue in high-mobility scenarios. In [8], [9] and [10] non-linear equalizers based on iterative detection and ICI cancellation are proposed, that achieve better results than linear equalizers. However, most of these schemes have a complexity that grows more than linearly with the size of the OFDM blocks and therefore becomes prohibitive for a mobile implementation of DVB-T2. In this letter we focus on systems with very large OFDM block sizes and propose a linear equalization technique to mitigate ICI, denoted per sub-block equalization (PSE), which includes pre-equalization for the reduction of ICI, followed by a conventional one-tap equalizer per subcarrier. The preequalization leverages on the efcient implementation of the fast Fourier transform and allows a simple design by modeling the channel as block-fading. In this scheme, pilot tones used with conventional OFDM receivers can not be used for channel estimation. Hence we propose to superimpose pseudo-noise (PN) sequences on the OFDM signal [11] and estimate the channel at each sub-block. Simulation results are presented for a mobile DVB-T2 scenario that ts with a possible next generation DVB for handheld devices (DVB-H), showing the merits of PSE. II. S YSTEM M ODEL For an OFDM system with subcarriers, transmitting the th data column vector () of size requires an inverse discrete Fourier transform (DFT). The DFT can be seen as a matrix operation yielding the block () = 1 [0 (), 1 (), . . . , 1 ()] = (), where is the matrix with entries [ ], = 1 2/ , , = 0, 1, . . . , 1. A GI of size is added to the modulated block to obtain the ( + )-size vector Tx () with entries { + (), = , + 1, . . . , 1, Tx, () = (1) (), = 0, 1, . . . , 1. We assume that transmission is performed over a time-varying channel and we indicate with ch, (), = 0, 1, . . . , 1, the sampled channel impulse response (CIR) for the output sample . After synchronization and GI removal, the receiver

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processes blocks of samples () having elements () =

1 =0

(0) (2) (1)

0,0 2 0,1 2 1,0 2 1,1 2

/2

poly

(0)

ch, ()Tx, () + () ,

= 0, 1, . . . , 1, where () is the additive white 2 Gaussian noise having zero mean and variance . As no interference arises among different OFDM blocks, in the following we concentrate on a single OFDM block and drop index from the notation. In a conventional OFDM receiver, an -size DFT is applied on each block to yield = = + , (3) where is the channel matrix in the frequency domain and is the -size DFT of the noise vector. For a time-invariant channel over each block, i.e. ch, () = ch, , matrix turns out to be diagonal and contains the -size DFT of the CIR. In this case the system can be modeled as a set of parallel atfading channels with no mutual interference. However, when the channel is not constant over an OFDM block, is a full matrix and each element of is a linear combination of all data symbols, i.e. it is affected by ICI from data symbols transmitted on other subcarriers. Dening the average CIR 1 1 over the entire OFDM block as = =0 ch, (), and collecting its -size DFT on the diagonal of matrix with entries 1 2 , = [], = (4)
=0

(1)

/2

poly

(1)

Fig. 1. Decimation-in-frequency decomposition of the FFT on samples. We highlight processing over sub-blocks of size : = 2 and = /2.

, suitably combined with twiddle factors =

= 0, 1, . . . , 1, and diagonal () with entries [ ], = 2/ , before being processed () by FFTs of size . The output of FFT , poly , is the () th polyphase component of , i.e. ,poly = + . In turn, each -size FFT can reproduce the same structure using smaller size FFTs, and the process is iterated until the basic buttery of an elementary FFT of size 2 is reached. In order to derive the pre-equalizer, we modify this implementation by inserting for each sub-block the cascade of a) an FFT of size , b) the multiplication by an -size pre-equalizer diagonal matrix () and c) an IFFT of size . By integrating the new blocks in the scheme of Fig. 1 and eliminating redundant FFT/IFFT couples, we obtain the scheme of Fig. 2, where FFTs of size are at the front end. We indicate the -size FFT of sub-block () as () = () , () = () () , which are then recombined to obtain 1 0, () , () =0 poly = 1 , () 1 () ,
=0

1 2/ , () matrices

(3) can be rewritten as = + + , where = is a matrix with null diagonal. III. P ER S UB - BLOCK E QUALIZATION (PSE) The basic idea behind per sub-block equalization is that if the channel could be modeled as time-invariant over subblocks of the OFDM block, equalization could be performed by a time-invariant structure over each sub-block. Let be the sub-block size and the number of sub-blocks within each OFDM block, i.e. = . Only for the pre-equalizer design, we model the channel as block fading and denote () its CIR on sub-block as ch, ( + ) = , for = 0, 1, . . . , 1, = 0, 1, . . . , 1, = 0, 1, . . . , 1. () We indicate the corresponding DFT of size as = 1 () 2 in (4) is the average of . Moreover, =0 () , i.e. 1 1 () = . (5) =0 The aim of pre-equalization is to compensate timevariations of the channel across sub-blocks. In order to obtain an efcient solution, we implement the PSE in the frequency domain by integrating the pre-equalizer within the fast Fourier transform (FFT) structure of the conventional OFDM receiver. To this end, among various possible FFT implementations [12] we consider the decimation-in-frequency decomposition shown in Fig. 1, where block is split into sub-blocks () , = 0, 1, . . . , 1, of equal size , with entries () = + , = 0, 1, . . . , 1. These sub-blocks are

(6)

and rst perform pre-equalization by () to obtain vectors (7)

= 0, = 1, 2, . . . , 1.

(8) In turn is equalized by a diagonal matrix : this is the conventional per-subcarrier equalizer to compensate channel dispersion. In a conventional (CONV) receiver () is not present and only is used. Note that the pre-equalization on sub-block () can be 1 written as () () , resulting in a circulant timedomain ltering on () . On the other hand, when applied to highly dispersive channels, the time domain implementation would be signicantly more complex than that proposed here in the frequency domain. In (7) the aim of () is to mitigate channel time variations by forcing the cascade of the sub-block channel and the pre-equalizer to yield the same average channel frequency response , which is the case when the channel is time invariant. However, as the signal () is subject to interference from adjacent sub-blocks due to the absence of GI in each subblock, compensation of time variations across sub-blocks can

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(0)

/2

(0)

(0)

(0)

0,1 2 1,0 2

poly

(0)

(1)

/2

(1)

(1)

(1)

1,1 2

1 /2

(1)

/2

poly

(1)

r e o r d e r i n g

Fig. 2.

Modication of the basic scheme of Fig. 1 with = 2 and = /2.

only be met with some approximation. Moreover, using preequalizers which are affected by inter-block interference to compensate also channel dispersion, would result in very poor system performance. Indeed, the average channel is equalized at the output of the OFDM receiver as in CONV structures. Furthermore, note that when the number of sub-blocks is equal to , i.e. each sub-block comprises only one sample, pre-equalization becomes a time-domain windowing. However, in this case ICI is not completely removed and much more complex equalizers are needed [8]. In our scheme if is too short, due to the absence of GI, we would have a lot of inter-block interference and, using only one pre-equalizer coefcient per subcarrier, the whole structure would yield very poor performance. A. Equalizer Design As a criterion for the pre-equalizer design, we consider the minimization of the ICI power at the detection point, while leaving unaltered noise and data signals. In Section III-B we also propose a second design method which includes the effect of noise. From (3) and (4), the ICI power at the detection point can be written as [ 1 ] 1 2 2 ( + ) , (9) = E =0 where E[] denotes expectation. Let us denote as the () size vector with entries []+ = and let us dene the (+1)1 1 () -size vectors = ( + ) , where denotes components of from to . By applying the Parsevals theorem, (9) can be rewritten as
2 () = 1 1 1 E[() () () 2 ], =0 =0

sample, it turns out ( ) 2 1 () 2 2 sinc + =0 = , (12) ( ) 2 1 () 2 2 2 sinc + =0

,opt

()

where sinc () = sin()/( sin( )). Note that the design criterion (9) is not optimum from an information point of view, because by partially suppressing ICI with only one coefcient per subcarrier, we do not use the information contained in . The motivation of our choice is mainly to have a structure with limited design and implementation complexity when compared against other schemes (see Section IV-A), that suits with systems employing long OFDM blocks. As all sub-blocks should yield approximately the same average channel frequency response, the equalizer is the classical per-subcarrier equalizer compensating for , = 0, 1, . . . , 1. Note that, for a time-invariant channel, it is () () = and (12) provides = 1, i.e. pre-equalization is not active and we obtain a conventional OFDM receiver in which only the nal per-subcarrier equalizer, compensating frequency selectivity of the channel, is implemented.

B. Pre-equalizer Design for Noise and ICI Reduction We now consider as objective for the design of the preequalizer the mitigation of both ICI and noise, having as new target the minimization of [ 1 ] 1 2 . (13) 2 = E =0 Following an approach similar to that of the previous section, we obtain a different set of optimal pre-equalization coefcients, and in particular we have ( ) 2 1 () sinc2 =0 = , ( ) 1 2 () 2 2 2 sinc + =0

(10)

where we have made explicit the dependence on the preequalization coefcients. () By setting the gradient of (10) with respect to to zero, we obtain () () E[ ] () . (11) ,opt = () E[ 2 ] Assuming that data symbols are uncorrelated with zero 2 mean, variance and statistically independent of the noise

,opt

()

(14)

2 where in a comparison with (12) we observe that is used only at the denominator.

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(0)

/4

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(0) /4

/4 CB ( ) 2 ,2

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/4

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(2) /4

/4 CB ( ) 2 ,2

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/2

(1)

(1) /2

/2

(1)

(, 2)

(3)

/4

/4

(3)

/4

(3)

/4

(3)

Fig. 3.

Pre-equalization with two stages each operating on two input sub-blocks. The combining block CB( ,) is dened in Fig. 4.
0,0 0,1 . . .

(0) /

0,1 1,0 1,1 . . . 1 / (1)

r e o / r d e

combining block (CB) analogously to (5). For the example in Fig. 3, is the average channel, respectively, across the (0) (1) rst two sub-blocks for /4 and /4 , across the last two sub-blocks for /4 and /4 , and nally across all the four sub-blocks for /2 and /2 . IV. P ERFORMANCE R ESULTS We have considered a DVB-T2 scenario [1], with a bandwidth of 6 MHz, = 32768 (32k) subcarriers and a GI of /16 = 2k samples. A 16-QAM constellation is used. The channel is time-varying on a per-sample basis and therefore the pre-equalization scheme will be affected by ICI within each sub-block. The average signal to noise ratio (SNR) on the channel is 20 dB. The performance of the equalization schemes is evaluated in terms of the MSE at the detection point ] [ 1 1 2 , (15) = E =0 where for both the conventional (CONV) and the PSE receiver we have considered the linear MMSE channel dispersion 2 equalizer given by = 2 2 2 . Although we used + the PSE as from (12), simulations not reported here show that results for (14) are not very different. Moreover, for comparison purposes besides the CONV receiver we also report performance of the ICI mitigation schemes of [7] and [8]. A. Complexity Analysis For the evaluation of the complexity we consider both a) the design complexity, i.e. the number of operations required to compute the equalizer coefcients from the channel estimate and b) the implementation complexity for equalization.
(0) (1) (2) (3)

(1)

1,1

. . .
1,0 1,1

. . .

r i n

(1) /

. . .

1 /

g
(1)

1,1

Fig. 4.

Combining block CB(, ) used in Fig. 3.

C. Structure with Successive Stages In Fig. 2 the pre-equalizer operates on two sub-blocks of length /2 and comprises two diagonal matrices of size /2 /2. Working with a shorter sub-block size /4 () for = 4, we would require four diagonal matrices /4 , = 0, 1, 2, 3, each of size /4/4. The idea can be further generalized to sub-blocks with pre-equalization matrices. As an alternative, we could employ a structure with successive stages as in Fig. 3, where we have considered two preequalization stages: the rst consists of four diagonal matrices of size /4/4 and the second of two diagonal matrices of size /2 /2. It is easy to realize that all these structures are based on different architectures of the FFT [12]. Matrices () are determined using (12), where is the average channel over the sub-blocks combined with the next

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TABLE I C OMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY COMPARISON . Implementation Complexity OFDM System CONV OFDM PSE OFDM TEQ [7] PTEQ [7] SCHEME [8] + + (( + 1)( + 1) + 1) 2 + (2( + 1) + + 1) + + ( ) (3 2)/ + 2 DVB-T2 2.46 105 5.16 105 3.02 107 4.92 106 5.73 105 Design Complexity OFDM System (4 ) (( + + 1)3 ( + + 1)3 ) (( + 1)( + 1) 2 ) ( 2 ) DVB-T2 1.57 106 5.17 109 9.82 1011 1.07 109

Design complexity: About the PSE, we rst observe that the function sinc2 (/) can be truncated to the -th zero resulting in a design complexity of (4 ) operations. In our scenario we have = 3. About the time equalizer (TEQ) of [7], the reported complexity is ((+ +1)3 ( + + 1)3 ) operations, where is the channel length, is the length of the time-varying equalizing lter, while and are the number of paths of the basis expansion model used for the channel and the equalizer, respectively. Overall the complexity is related to the channel length and can be equal to that of the GI in the worst case. The alternative pertone equalizer (PTEQ) of [7] requires a design complexity of (( + 1)( + 1) 2 ) operations. About the scheme [8], most of the complexity comes from the design of the time-domain window which requires the computation of the dominant generalized eigenvector of a couple of matrices, with a complexity of ( 2 ) operations. Implementation complexity: The CONV scheme requires = (/2 log2 ( ) ) operations for the FFT and operations for equalization, while the PSE requires [(3 2)(/(2) log2 (/) /)] operations for the FFTs and 2 operations for pre-equalization and equalization. Besides the FFT, the ltering of the TEQ scheme in [7] requires (( + 1)( + 1) + 1) operations, while the PTEQ, even in its efcient implementation, requires at least two FFTs of size and (2( + 1) + + 1) products. The complexity of [8] is due to the FFT, the products due to windowing and about ( ) operations where is the number of iterations used after OFDM demodulation to decode transmitted symbols. Here = 10. Table I compares the design and implementation complexities of the various schemes for the considered DVB-T2 scenario illustrated in the next subsection. We observe that the schemes of [7] and [8] have both a design complexity of orders of magnitude greater than that of PSE. Here we recall that for a time-varying channel the design may have to be updated at each OFDM block. On the other hand, PSE has about three times the implementation complexity of the CONV receiver. B. Performance with Ideal Channel Estimation We rst consider a typically urban channel model with 6 taps (TU6) [2] having Doppler spectrum according to Jakes model with vehicle speed related to Doppler frequency , velocity of light and carrier frequency = 650 MHz by = /. For this short channel, although complexity is still considerable, it is possible to implement the TEQ equalizer of [7], and we can compare its performance against that of

PSE and CONV receiver. All other equalizers are too complex to implement. In particular, we consider a) single stage PSE operating on = 4 sub-blocks of length = 8192 (8k) each, b) the two stages PSE operating on 4 sub-blocks combined in groups of two at each step (see Fig. 3), c) the TEQ scheme proposed in [7] using unit-norm constraint with = 4, = 14, = 60 and a target CIR duration of one tap and d) the CONV receiver with both 32k and 8k subcarriers (length of each PSE sub-block). From Fig. 5 (solid lines) we note that both PSE schemes are able to signicantly reduce MSE with respect to the 32k CONV receiver, achieving a performance which is close to that of the 8k CONV receiver. Moreover, PSE with a single stage performs as the scheme with two stages. Note however that the solution 32k OFDM with PSE is to be preferred to the 8k CONV receiver, since the latter solution has a lower spectral efciency, due to the higher impact of GIs. Due to the ICI on each sub-block, we observe that the TEQ scheme, whose performance is almost independent of the speed, outperforms PSE at higher speed. In the low mobility scenario instead TEQ shows a performance degradation since the time-domain equalizer, with the aim of compensating timevariations of the channel, degrades target channel frequency response resulting in a worse MSE at the detection point. In order to evaluate the impact of PSE on a complete DVB-T2 receiver, we have performed simulations including interleaving and low density parity check (LDPC) coding. For a bit error rate (BER) of 104 after LDPC decoding as a target, we have considered two channel models: a) TU6 and b) a two-taps channel (as specied in [2]) where both taps have the same power and mutual delay between 20% and 90% of the GI. Numerical results not reported here show that in both scenarios PSE reaches the target BER at a speed from 50% to 100% higher than that achieved by the 32k CONV receiver, having the same spectral efciency. In this case, the design complexity prevents a comparison with the techniques of [7] and [8]. C. Performance with Channel Estimation Conventional methods for channel estimation in ODFM systems based on the use of pilot sub-tones are not directly applicable to our scheme because PSE requires the knowledge of the CIR on each sub-block. Moreover, the insertion of pilot tones to perform channel estimation in the frequency domain on each sub-block is problematic both at the transmitter and at the receiver. In this letter, as in [11], we propose to superimpose to the OFDM modulated samples a periodic

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V. C ONCLUSIONS We have proposed a new equalization structure for mobile systems with very large OFDM blocks that mitigates interchannel interference. Results obtained for a typical DVBT2 communication system show that the new scheme can operate at double the mobile speed for the same BER of a conventional receiver with the same spectral efciency. Moreover, implementation complexity is limited to about three times that of the conventional receiver. R EFERENCES

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[1] Frame structure channel coding and modulation for a second generation digital terrestrial television broadcasting system (DVB-T2)," ETSI EN 302 755 V1.1.1, Sep. 2009. [2] Implementation guidelines for a second generation digital terrestrial television broadcasting system (DVB-T2), DVB document A133," (draft TR 102 831 V0.10.4), June 2010. [3] Y. Zhao and S.-G. Haggman, Intercarrier interference self-cancellation scheme for OFDM mobile communication systems," IEEE Trans. Commun., vol. 49, no. 7, pp. 1185-1191, July 2001. [4] W. G. Jeon, K. H. Chang, and Y. S. Cho, An equalization technique for orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing systems in time-variant multipath channels," IEEE Trans. Commun., vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 27-32, Jan. 1999. [5] Y.-S. Choi, P. J. Voltz, and F. A. Cassara, On channel estimation and detection for multicarrier signals in fast and selective Rayleigh fading channels," IEEE Trans. Commun., vol. 49, no. 8, pp. 1375-1387, Aug. 2001. [6] S. Kim and G. J. Pottie, Robust OFDM in fast fading channels," in Proc. IEEE Globecom, vol. 2, pp. 1074-1078, San Francisco, CA, Dec. 2003. [7] I. Barhumi, G. Leus, and M. Moonen, Equalization for OFDM over doubly selective channels," IEEE Trans. Signal Process., vol. 54, no. 4, pp. 1445-1458, Apr. 2006. [8] P. Schniter, Low-complexity equalization of OFDM in doubly selective channels," IEEE Trans. Signal Process., vol. 52, no. 4, pp. 1002-1011, Apr. 2004. [9] S. Tomasin, A. Gorokhov, H. Yang, and J.-P. Linnartz, Iterative interference cancellation and channel estimation for mobile OFDM," IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun., vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 238-245, Jan. 2005. [10] K. Fang, L. Rugini, and G. Leus, Low-complexity block turbo equalization for OFDM systems in time-varying channels," IEEE Trans. Signal Process., vol. 56, no. 11, pp. 5555-5566, Nov. 2008. [11] A. Goljahani, N. Benvenuto, S. Tomasin, and L. Vangelista, Superimposed sequence versus pilot aided channel estimations for next generation DVB-T systems," IEEE Trans. Broadcast., vol. 55, no. 1, pp. 140-144, Mar. 2009. [12] A. V. Oppenheim and R. W. Shafer, Discrete-Time Signal Processing. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989.

Fig. 5. MSE at the detection point as a function of the speed for a TU6 channel with ideal channel estimation (solid lines) and PN-based channel estimation (dashed lines).

PN sequence with period at most equal to the sub-block length . Once the CIR is estimated, the component of the received signal due to the PN sequence is canceled before demodulation [11]. The superposition allows a simple receiver implementation at the expense of a slightly lower SNR. The impact on SNR can be tuned by properly choosing the ratio between the power of the PN sequence and the power of 2 2 the OFDM signal, in fact we have SNR = (1 + )/ . We consider = 1 = 8191 and = 0.2. For comparison purposes the CONV receiver uses a single CIR estimated by the PN sequence over the entire OFDM block, averaging the four CIRs across sub-blocks. Observing from above results that using more stages does not improve performance (at the cost of a higher computational complexity), we consider the PSE scheme with only one stage. In Fig. 5 (dashed lines) we observe that the PSE signicantly outperforms the CONV receiver, with a larger gap at higher speeds. On the other hand, at lower speeds the CONV receiver outperforms the PSE since interference on the channel estimate yields errors in the preequalizer, which are avoided in the CONV receiver. These issues could be circumvented by activating the PSE only when the channel changes signicantly over time, while resorting to the CONV receiver at lower speeds.