Intercarrier Interference Immune Single Carrier OFDM via Magnitude-Keyed Modulation for High Speed Aerial Vehicle Communication

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has been considered as a strong candidate for next generation wireless communication systems. Compared to traditional OFDM, Single Carrier OFDM (SC-OFDM) has demonstrated excellent bit error rate (BER) performance, as well as low peak to average power ratio (PAPR). Similar to other multi-carrier transmission technologies, SC-OFDM suffers significant performance degradation resulting from intercarrier interference (ICI) in high mobility environments. Existing techniques for OFDM can be directly adopted in SC-OFDM to improve performance, however, this improved performance comes at costs such as decreased throughput. In this paper, we analyze the effect of ICI on an SC-OFDM system and propose a novel modulation scheme. The proposed Magnitude-Keyed Modulation (MKM) modulation provides SC-OFDM system immunity to ICI and with an easy implementation it significantly outperforms OFDM, SC-OFDM and MC-CDMA systems with Phase Shift Keying (PSK) modulation and Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) in severe ICI environment. Analysis also illustrates the proposed SC-OFDM system with MKM modulation maintains low PAPR compared to traditional OFDM and SC-OFDM systems with PSK and QAM modulations. Simulation results for different modulation schemes in various ICI environments confirm the effectiveness of the proposed system.