On the design and performance analysis of multisymbol encapsulated OFDM systems

A new multicarrier system, termed multisymbol encapsulated orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MSE-OFDM), is proposed, in which one cyclic prefix (CP) is used for multiple OFDM symbols. The original motivation for the MSE-OFDM proposal is to reduce the redundancy due to the CP in static-channel environments. The authors then found that an alternative implementation of the system can be used to improve the robustness to frequency offset and reduce the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). Equalization and demodulation algorithms for the MSE-OFDM system are proposed. A new preamble and the corresponding frequency-offset and channel estimation techniques are studied for the MSE-OFDM system. Using the proposed MSE-OFDM preamble, the joint maximum likelihood (ML) estimation of the frequency offset and the channel impulse response (CIR) is investigated in this paper. Possible ways to reduce the joint estimation complexity, including exploitation of the preamble structure, approximation of the joint ML estimator, and fast Fourier transform (FFT) pruning, are discussed. The performance of the proposed MSE-OFDM systems and channel estimators are analyzed and verified through numerical simulations. An analysis on the bandwidth efficiency, the performance with frequency offset, and the PAPR of the MSE-OFDM system are also presented