Performance of an experimental 384 kb/s 1900 MHz OFDM radio link in a wide-area high-mobility environment

The first phase of an experimental investigation into future generation high-speed, high-mobility, wireless data communications techniques using OFDM has recently been completed. This paper reports on a prototype radio link intended to provide a high-speed downlink for wireless Internet access. Practical RF impairments and realistic algorithms have been studied to address the emerging need for data network access from high mobility platforms at wired LAN-like data rates. The performance of a prototype has been measured under a variety of radio channel conditions, including channels with two equal rays with from 2 to 20 μsec of delay separation and GSM channel models. Doppler fading rates from 1-200 Hz were tested. Measured results were compared with an idealized (e.g., no timing or frequency offset, no interchannel interference, etc.) simulation to verify the accuracy of the real-time implementation. Close agreement between the real-time prototype measurements, theory, and idealized simulations were observed