54 3 Link-Level Aspects
3.3 Iterative Diversity Reception for Coded
OFDM Transmission Over Fading Channels
M. Matuszak, R. Urbansky, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany
3.3.1 Introduction
Time- and frequency-selective fading resulting from time-variant multipath propaga-
tion can be mitigated by forward error correction (FEC) channel coding in combina-
tion with time and frequency interleaving. In broadband systems coded orthogonal
frequency-division multiplexing (COFDM) is a well-known implementation of this
concept, which is applied, e.g., in digital terrestrial video broadcasting (DVB-T),
Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB), and Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) [1] [4].
A bandwidth of 1.5 MHz for DAB or 8 MHz for DVB-T enables efficient frequency
interleaving to mitigate fading. However, DRM is restricted to a bandwidth of up
to 20 kHz for compatibility to existing services [3]. In addition, DRM transmission
especially in short-wave bands is characterized by time varying ionospheric fading.
Whereas fast fading is covered by time interleaving, long-term frequency-selective
fading severely affects transmission, since a narrow bandwidth results in a high
percentage of subcarriers with low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), which may exceed
FEC capabilities.
Diversity techniques also allow to mitigate fading [5]. COFDM systems, e.g., can
inherently utilize delay diversity or path diversity in single frequency networks, pro-
vided the OFDM guard interval covers the maximum path or delay spread [1]. In
addition, for narrow-band systems like DRM, antenna diversity, polarization diver-
sity and especially frequency diversity may also be taken into account. Receiver
concepts for frequency or antenna diversity usually apply combining techniques, like
selection combining, equal gain combining or maximum ratio combining (MRC).
In general, these methods combine the properly equalized and synchronized analog
signals before FEC decoding.
We proposed a different approach: since diversity transmission of FEC encoded
data can be regarded as a parallel concatenated coding scheme which allows for
turbo decoding, we combine the received and appropriately equalized signals in an
iterative decoding process, see Fig. 3.13 [3].
Propagating extrinsic information in terms of log-likelihood-ratio (LLR), the turbo
diversity (TD) scheme delivers additional iteration gains compared to MRC [2].
This requires that the constituent component codes, usually punctured convolutional
codes (CC), have to be chosen appropriately by applying extrinsic information trans-
fer (EXIT) chart methods. Instead of CC, codes can be also applied, where again
these methods have been used [7]. The project focuses mainly on LDPC codes as
constituent codes, because they are known to approach the Shannon limit as close
as Turbo codes (TC) [8] and efficient soft-input soft-output decoding algorithms
are available.