On OFDM/OQAM receivers

In OFDM/OQAM systems, the presence of the intrinsic interference effect, caused by the lack of complex field orthogonality of the pulses employed, challenges the symbol detection task at the receiver. In this paper, the problem of equalization in such a system is studied, through the comparative analysis of three approaches to zero forcing equalization: (a) the classical receiver, which operates directly on the received signal at each subcarrier without any additional processing, (b) the dispersive receiver, forming sufficient statistics for the symbol decision, and (c) an alternative approach, which aims at completely eliminating intrinsic interference before deciding the symbols. The receivers are formulated and analyzed under the common assumptions for the OFDM/OQAM input/output model. The classical receiver is then shown to perform similarly with the other two for relatively short channels, while it outperforms them when the channel dispersion is large with respect to the number of subcarriers. Through these results, the sensitivity of the detection performance of alternative receivers to the validity of the input/output model is revealed and assessed.