Symbol Cyclic Shift Equalization PAM-OFDM—A Low Complexity CP-Free OFDM Scheme

In traditional orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems, a cyclic prefix (CP) must be used in every block for intersymbol interference (ISI) suppression in time-dispersive channels at a price of severely impaired spectrum efficiency. To deal with this issue, the symbol cyclic shift equalization (SCSE) algorithm was proposed to implement a CP-free OFDM system. In this paper, we aim to further reduce the computational complexity of the SCSE algorithm. In particular, a pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) is used at a transmitter to construct conjugate symmetric OFDM blocks, while only partial samples in an OFDM block are involved in the SCSE algorithm at the receiver side, leading to a significantly reduced implementation complexity if compared to an SCSE quadratic-amplitude modulation(QAM)/phase-shift keying (PSK)-OFDM system, where all samples in an OFDM block must be involved in the detection process. The performance of the proposed SCSE PAM-OFDM scheme is analyzed and compared to traditional OFDM systems. The results obtained from this paper verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.