Spectrum- and Energy-Efficient OFDM Based on Simultaneous Multi-Channel Reconstruction

Time domain synchronous OFDM (TDS-OFDM) has a higher spectrum and energy efficiency than standard cyclic prefix OFDM (CP-OFDM) by replacing the unknown CP with a known pseudorandom noise (PN) sequence. However, due to mutual interference between the PN sequence and the OFDM data block, TDS-OFDM cannot support high-order modulation schemes such as 256QAM in realistic static channels with large delay spread or high-definition television (HDTV) delivery in fast fading channels. To solve these problems, we propose the idea of using multiple inter-block-interference (IBI)-free regions of small size to realize simultaneous multi-channel reconstruction under the framework of structured compressive sensing (SCS). This is enabled by jointly exploiting the sparsity of wireless channels as well as the characteristic that path delays vary much slower than path gains. In this way, the mutually conditional time-domain channel estimation and frequency-domain data demodulation in TDS-OFDM can be decoupled without the use of iterative interference removal. The Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) of the proposed estimation scheme is also derived. Moreover, the guard interval amplitude in TDS-OFDM can be reduced to improve the energy efficiency, which is infeasible for CP-OFDM. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed SCS-aided TDS-OFDM scheme has a higher spectrum and energy efficiency than CP-OFDM by more than 10% and 20% respectively in typical applications.