ICI mitigation for pilot-aided OFDM mobile systems

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is robust against frequency selective fading due to the increase of the symbol duration. However, for mobile applications channel time-variations in one OFDM symbol introduce intercarrier-interference (ICI) which degrades the performance. This becomes more severe as mobile speed, carrier frequency or OFDM symbol duration increases. As delay spread increases, symbol duration should also increase in order to maintain a near-constant channel in every frequency subband. Also, due to the high demand for bandwidth, there is a trend toward higher carrier frequencies. Therefore, to have an acceptable reception quality for the applications that experience high delay and Doppler spread, there is a need for ICI mitigation within one OFDM symbol. We introduce two new methods to mitigate ICI in an OFDM system with coherent channel estimation. Both methods use a piece-wise linear model to approximate channel time-variations. The first method extracts channel time-variations information from the cyclic prefix. The second method estimates these variations using the next symbol. We find a closed-form expression for the improvement in average signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) when our mitigation methods are applied for a narrowband time-variant channel. Finally, our simulation results show how these methods would improve the performance in a highly time-variant environment with high delay spread.