Broadband multicarrier communication receiver based on analog to digital conversion in the frequency domain

This paper introduces a multicarrier communication receiver for broadband applications based on analog to digital conversion (ADC) of the received signal in the frequency domain. The samples of the spectrum of the received signal are used in the digital receiver to estimate the transmitted symbols through a matched filter operation in the discrete frequency domain. The proposed receiver is aimed at the reception of high information rates in a multicarrier signal with very large bandwidth. Thus, the receiver architecture provides a solution to some of the challenging problems found in the implementation of conventional wideband multicarrier receivers based on time-domain ADC, since It efficiently parallelizes the A/D conversion reducing the sampling speed requirements. We show that the sampling rate requirements are relaxed as the number of frequency samples is increased, which introduces a trade-off between complexity and sampling rate. The new receiver possesses additional advantages, including scalability with increasing frequency samples, the possibility of optimally allocating the available number of bits for the ATD conversion across the frequency domain samples which potentially reduces the distortion introduced by the high-speed ADC, narrowband interference suppression that can be directly carried out in the frequency domain, and inherent robustness to frequency offset which makes it an attractive solution when compared with traditional multicarrier receivers. We also investigate how the proposed receiver responds to common multicarrier communication receiver problems such as phase noise and channel frequency selectivity.