Linear Suppression of Intercarrier Interference in Time-Varying OFDM Systems: From the Viewpoint of Multiuser Detection

Intercarrier interference (ICI) in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems, which causes substantial performance degradation in time-varying fading channels, is analyzed. An equivalent spreading code formulation is derived based on the analogy of OFDM and code division multiple access (CDMA) systems. Techniques as linear multiuser detection in CDMA systems are applied to suppress the ICI in OFDM systems. The performance of linear detection, measured using multiuser efficiency and asymptotic multiuser efficiency, is analyzed given the assumption of perfect channel state information (CSI), which serves as an upper bound for the performance of practical systems. For systems without CSI, time domain and frequency domain channel estimation based linear detectors are proposed. The performance gains and robustness of a linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) filter over a traditional filter (TF) and matched filter (MF) in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime are demonstrated with numerical simulation results.