Another approach to save energy in OFDM systems

In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient error correction scheme to lower the power consumption of the ADCs in the OFDM system. The proposed opportunistic error correction scheme is based on resolution adaptive ADCs and fountain codes. The key idea is to reduce the dynamic range of the channel by discarding part of the channel in deep fading. Correspondingly, the power consumption in ADCs can be decreased. In our approach, each sub-carrier transports a fountain-encoded packet. The receiver only decodes fountain-encoded packets with high SNR. Others are discarded. To compensate for the discarded packets, a high order modulation is used. The new error correction layer does not require perfect channel knowledge, so it can be applied in a real system. With our approach and 16-QAM, the energy consumption in ADCs is reduced by around 73% with non-perfect channel estimation comparing to the traditional IEEE 802.11a system under the same channel conditions and throughput.