Performance evaluation of OFDM transmission over a challenging urban propagation environment

The paper introduces a performance evaluation of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission schemes over a challenging urban propagation environment, considering 3D scattering, providing also a comparison with 2D considerations. After an analytic calculation of the power of received signal components (faded useful signal, intercarrier interference, intersymbol interference and noise) the authors present results of system performance evaluation under different propagation conditions (e.g., various Doppler shift values) and various values of key system parameters. BER (bit error rate) calculations are provided for a 16-QAM OFDM transmission scheme over Rayleigh fading channels, with and without Reed-Solomon coding techniques. Finally, the influence of carrier offset on the system performance is examined.