A jitter model for OFDM systems

Multicarrier systems represent the most common modulation format for data transmission. In particular OFDM, employing orthogonal sub-carriers, has been shown to be one of the most efficient system from a spectral point of view. We examined the effects of timing jitter in an OFDM receiver when the receiver oscillator sampling time is affected by random errors. A new compact matrix formulation to study this problem is presented. The timing jitter is considered as the effect of a convolution product between the samples of the received signal and two time-variant impulses. These impulses are modeled as Gaussian random variables having non zero, time-invariant, mean. The effects on the signal´s constellations and the performance are also presented.