General total inter-carrier interference cancellation for OFDM high speed aerial vehicle communication

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has been considered as a strong candidate for next generation high speed aerial vehicle communication systems. However, OFDM systems suffers severe performance degradation due to inter-carrier interference (ICI) in high mobility channel, if no ICI cancellation is performed. Traditionally, training symbols have been employed in one packet to help the OFDM receiver to estimate the multi-path channel and the carrier frequency offset (CFO) between the transmitter local oscillator and the receiver local oscillator. However, in aerial vehicle communication, the relative transmitter-receiver speed changes so rapidly that it is unreasonable to assume a constant speed (and CFO) during the entire packet transmission. Hence, to accurately estimate the CFO, training symbols need to be transmitted for every OFDM symbol. Obviously, this significantly reduces OFDM throughput while adding complexity due to repeated CFO estimation. In this paper, we extend our previous work to propose a joint channel/CFO estimation and ICI cancellation algorithm. Specifically, in our previous work, we have proposed a total ICI cancellation algorithm using parallel processing for OFDM system which offers the excellent ICI cancellation and BER performance. However, in this work, perfect channel information was assumed. In this paper, we combine the channel estimation with the ICI cancellation together. The proposed general total ICI cancellation algorithm has the ability to jointly estimate the carrier frequency offset and channel information, and improve the performance significantly. Meanwhile, a serial processing is proposed to reduce the computation complexity. Simulation results in different scenarios confirm the performance of the proposed scheme in multipath fading channels for high speed aerial vehicle communication.