Outage Performance of Flexible OFDM Schemes in Packet-Switched Transmissions

α-OFDM, a generalization of the OFDM modulation, is proposed. This new modulation enhances the outage capacity performance of bursty communications. The α-OFDM scheme is easily implementable as it only requires an additional time symbol rotation after the IDFT stage and a subsequent phase rotation of the cyclic prefix. The physical effect of the induced rotation is to slide the DFT window over the frequency spectrum. When successively used with different angles α at the symbol rate, α-OFDM provides frequency diversity in block fading channels. Interestingly, simulation results show a substantial gain in terms of outage capacity and outage BER in comparison with classical OFDM modulation schemes. The framework is extended to multiantenna and multicellular OFDM-based standards. Practical simulations, in the context of 3GPP-LTE, called hereafter α-LTE, sustain our theoretical claims.