Coded-OFDM in various multipath fading environments

In wireless communication, concept of parallel transmission of symbols is applied to achieve high throughput and better transmission quality. Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is one of the techniques for parallel transmission. It is used for a variety of broadband systems such as asymmetric digital subscriber lines, very-high-speed digital subscriber lines, digital video and audio broadcasting, and wide local area network standards such as IEEE 802.11a, IEEE 802.11g, and European telecommunication standard institute ( ETSI). However in fading environments the bit error rate (BER) increases. The performance can be improved by using some kind of channel coding. This form of OFDM is called coded-OFDM (COFDM). In this paper our aim is to analyze and compare the performance of COFDM in Additive white Gaussian Noise (AWGN), Rayleigh, Rician & Nakagami fading environments. The channel coding used is Reed Solomon (RS) code with 1/2 and 2/3 convolution codes. The performance parameter is BER and the mapping schemes used are BPSK, QPSK, 16-QAM and 64-QAM. All other parameters are as per IEEE 802.11a specifications.