FADAC-OFDM: Frequency-Asynchronous Distributed Alamouti-Coded OFDM

We propose frequency-asynchronous distributed Alamouti-coded orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (FADAC-OFDM). The proposed scheme effectively mitigates the intercarrier interference (ICI) due to frequency offset (FO) between two distributed antennas. The transmitter side of the proposed scheme transmits each of the two subslots in Alamouti code through two remote subcarriers symmetric to the center frequency and is referred to as space-frequency reversal schemes by Wang et al. or Choi. The receiver side of the proposed scheme is significantly different from the conventional scheme or the scheme proposed by Wang et al. in that it performs two discrete Fourier transform (DFT), each of which is synchronized to each transmit antenna´s carrier frequency. The decision variables are generated by performing a simple linear combining with the same complexity as that of the conventional Alamouti code. The derivation shows that in flat-fading channels, the dominant ICI components due to FO cancel each other during the combining process. The proposed scheme achieves almost the same performance as the ideal Alamouti scheme, even with large FO. To use this ICI self-cancellation property for selective fading channels or in cases with timing offset (TO) between two transmit antennas, the total subcarriers are divided into several subblocks, and the proposed scheme is applied to each subblock. For mildly selective channels or cases with practically small TO, the proposed scheme achieves significantly improved performance compared with the conventional space-frequency Alamouti-coded OFDM.