Unified Time-Frequency OFDM Transmission with Self Interference Cancellation

Time domain synchronous orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (TDS-OFDM) has higher spectral efficiency than the standard cyclic prefix OFDM (CP-OFDM) OFDM by replacing the random CP with the known training sequence (TS), which could be also used for synchronization and channel estimation. However, TDS-OFDM requires suffers from performance loss over fading channels due to the iterative interference cancellation has to be used to remove the mutual interferences between the TS and the useful data. To solve this problem, the novel TS based OFDM transmission scheme, referred to as the unified time-frequency OFDM (UTF-OFDM), is proposed in which the time-domain TS and the frequency-domain pilots are carefully designed to naturally avoid the interference from the TS to the data without any reconstruction. The proposed UTF-OFDM based flexible frame structure supports effective channel estimation and reliable channel equalization, while imposing a significantly lower complexity than the TDS-OFDM system at the cost of a slightly reduced spectral efficiency. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed UTF-OFDM substantially outperforms the existing TDS-OFDM, in terms of the system's achievable bit error rate.