Simulation of wideband mobile OFDM system for hardware implementation

A flexible and detailed simulation model for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system has been built upon the design framework Ptolemy to guide and regulate hardware development in several concurrent microelectronics projects. The system is targeted on wideband multiple-user applications with up to 20 Mbit/s data rate at 2 GHz frequency range in the mobile environment. Several advances in OFDM system research have been accommodated to improve the system performance under the constraints of implementation complexity. These include maximum likelihood estimation for timing and frequency offset utilizing the cyclic prefix, window application and automatic phase control. The number of sub-carriers have been chosen to be an optimal value that gives best performance in fading channels. Quantization noise has been modeled in a two-tier form, which is flexible enough to allow hardware designers to pursue different approaches to meet the target requirement. The simulation model has been used for the assessment of both system performance and implementation complexity