Intercarrier Interference Immune Single Carrier OFDM via Magnitude-Keyed Modulation for High Speed Aerial Vehicle Communication

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has been considered as a strong candidate for next generation wireless communication systems. Compared to traditional OFDM, Single Carrier OFDM (SC-OFDM) has demonstrated excellent bit error rate (BER) performance, as well as low peak to average power ratio (PAPR). Similar to other multi-carrier transmission technologies, SC-OFDM suffers significant performance degradation resulting from intercarrier interference (ICI) in high mobility environments. Existing techniques for OFDM can be directly adopted in SC-OFDM to improve performance, however, this improved performance comes at costs such as decreased throughput. In this paper, we analyze the effect of ICI on an SC-OFDM system and propose a novel modulation scheme. The proposed Magnitude-Keyed Modulation (MKM) modulation provides SC-OFDM system immunity to ICI and with an easy implementation it significantly outperforms OFDM, SC-OFDM and MC-CDMA systems with Phase Shift Keying (PSK) modulation and Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) in severe ICI environment. Analysis also illustrates the proposed SC-OFDM system with MKM modulation maintains low PAPR compared to traditional OFDM and SC-OFDM systems with PSK and QAM modulations. Simulation results for different modulation schemes in various ICI environments confirm the effectiveness of the proposed system.

I. Introduction

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and other multi-carrier transmission technologies such as Multi-Carrier Code Division Multiple Access (MC-CDMA) have been considered strong candidates for next generation high-data-rate wireless communication systems because of their good BER performance and high spectrum efficiency [1]. It is highly desired to adopt multi-carrier transmission in aerial vehicle communication to improve the spectrum efficiency.