Robust Decision Feedback Equalizer for OFDM System under Severe ISI Channel

Inter-symbol interference (ISI) problem is inevitable when the guard interval (GI) is shorter than the delay spread (DS) for an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system. Iterative techniques have been proposed to overcome such a problem. However, most of existing algorithms are not efficient for an OFDM system with a small GI working under the channel with a large DS. Especially in the case of the DS spans a longer time than the half of the OFDM symbol duration. On the other hand, conventional algorithms, which can reduce the effects of the severe ISI, often employ several impractical assumptions to support the conclusions. In this paper, we present a robust decision feedback equalizer (DFE) for the OFDM system to overcome the severe ISI problem. The proposed DFE removes the ISI in a same manner as the residual inter-symbol interference cancellation (RISIC) algorithm. However, the inter-carrier interference (ICI) is reduced via cyclicity removal instead of the cyclicity restoration used in the conventional algorithms. The link-level simulation (LLS) results indicate that our proposed DFE scheme can dramatically improve the BER performance when the DS spans longer than the half of ODFM symbol duration.