Combating Frequency Selectivity of OFDM Radio Channels by Partial Data Spreading

The performance of OFDM transmission over frequency selective fading radio channels can be improved by spreading the data elements of each OFDM symbol over all OFDM subcarriers. This known approach to frequency diversity is termed Full Data Spreading (FDS) and would render data detection prohibitively complex. In order to affordably seize the advantage of frequency diversity by data spreading, we propose the scheme Partial Data Spreading (PDS), in which each data element is spread only over an appropriately chosen subset of the OFDM subcarriers.