Forschungszentrum Telekommunikation Wien

OFDMA/SC-FDMA Basics for 3GPP LTE

(E-UTRA)
T. Zemen
April 24, 2008

Outline

Part I - OFDMA and SC/FDMA basics

Multipath propagation
Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)
Soft frequency reuse
Peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR)
Single carrier/frequency division multiple access
(SC/FDMA)

Part II - Time-variant channel estimation for OFDM

Thomas Zemen

OFDMA/SC-FDMA Basics for 3GPP LTE (E-UTRA)

April 24, 2008

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References
Motorola, Long Term Evolution (LTE): Overview of LTE Air-Interface,
Technical White Paper, 2007
Rohde&Schwarz, UMTS Long Term Evolution (LTE) Technology
Introduction, 2007.
Freescale, Overview of the 3GPP Long Term Evolution Physical Layer,
2007.
3GPP TS 36.2111, Physical Channels and Modulation (Rel. 8), March,
2008.
H. G. Myung, J. Lim, and D. J. Goodman, Single Carrier FDMA for
Uplink Wireless Transmission, IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazin, pp.
30-38, September, 2006.
U. Sorger, I. De Broeck, and M. Schnell, Interleaved FDMA - A New
Spread Spectrum Multiple-Access Scheme, Proc. IEEE ICC 98,
Atlanta, GA, pp-1013-1017, June, 1998.

T. Zemen and C. F. Mecklenbrauker,

Time-Variant Channel Estimation
using Discrete Prolate Spheroidal Sequences, IEEE Transactions on
Signal Processing, vol. 53, no. 9, September 2005, pp. 3597-3607.
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Time-Variant Multipath Propagation

scatterer

v velocity
1 ej2f1 t (t 1 )

` path
` attenuation

0 ej2f0 t (t 0 )

` time delay
receiver

user

2 ej2f2 t (t 2 )
v

f` Doppler shift
L0 number of
paths

scatterer

Time-variant channel impulse response

h(t, ) =

0 1
LX

` ej2f` t (t ` )

`=0
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OFDM Fundamentals (I)

Single carrier versus multi carrier
f

single carrier

multi carrier

d[0]
d[1]
d[3]

d[7]

d[5]

d[6]

d[3]

d[4]

d[1]

d[2]

d[0]

d[2]
d[4]
d[5]
d[6]
d[7]
t

t
0 TC

NTC

1/TC Chip rate

N Number of subcarriers
d[0] . . . d[7] Data symbols
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OFDM Fundamentals (II)

Orthogonal subcarriers
magnitude

Df

...

...

f
fq

f q+1

fq = q/(NTC )
q {0, . . . , N 1} Subcarrier index
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OFDM Fundamentals (III)

Processing steps
subcarriers

symbols
(BPSK)

modulated
subcarriers

f1

2*f

3*f

*(+1)

*(-1)

*(+1)

Efficiently implementable by means of an inverse discrete

Fourier transform.
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OFDM Fundamentals (IV)

Cyclic prefix insertion

TS

TS OFDM symbol duration.

A copy of the signal tail (length TG ) is inserted at the
beginning of each OFDM symbol.
Absorbs multipath components.
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OFDM Fundamentals (V)

OFDM time frequency representation
5 MHz Bandwidth
FFT

Sub-carriers

Guard Intervals

Symbols

Frequency

Time

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OFDM System Design

No inter-symbol interference: Guard interval larger than
the delay spread TD
GTC = TG > TD
Spectral efficiency: Symbol duration much larger than
delay spread
NTC = TS  TD
Inter-carrier interference: Symbol rate much higher than
Doppler shift fD
1/TS  fD
G cyclic prefix length in number of chips
N number of subcarriers
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Receiver Side Processing

Drop cyclic prefix and perform DFT
Channel partitioned in N parallel frequency flat channels
Simple equalization - complexity grows with N log(N)
g[0]

n[0]

d[0]

y[0]
g[q]

n[q]

...

...

q subcarrier index

y[q]

d[q]

d data symbol
g subcarrier channel
coefficient
n additive noise

d[N-1]
Thomas Zemen

...

...

y received symbol
...

...

y[N-1]

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OFDMA (I)

Orthogonal time-frequency grid

frequency
a subcarrier

time
an OFDM symbol

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OFDMA (II)
Time division multiple access (TDMA)

frequency diversity

frequency
user 1
user 2
user 3
user 4
user 5
user 6

time

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OFDMA (II)
Frequency division multiple access (FDMA)
frequency
user 1
user 2
user 3
user 4
user 5
user 6

time
time diversity

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LTE Parameters (Downlink)

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LTE Resource Grid (Downlink)

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LTE Resource Blocks (Downlink)

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OFDMA (III)
Time-variant frequency-selective channel

frequency diversity

frequency

time
time diversity
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OFDMA (III)
Time-frequency pattern
frequency

frequency diversity

user 1
user 2
user 3
user 4

time
time diversity
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Soft Frequency Reuse (I)

At cell boundaries the signal to interference ratio (SIR) is

approx. 0 dB due to frequency reuse 1
DS-CDMA uses soft handover at the cell boundary
OFDM based air interface allows soft frequency reuse for
users at the cell boundary

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Soft Frequency Reuse (II)

b- s
Su rier
r
ca

po
w
er
de
ns

BS 2

subcarr
ier

ity

BS 1

MS 22

Pow
er de
n

MS 21

sity

MS 31
MS 11

Po

ity
ns
de
r
we

MS 12

s
ca ubrr
ie
r

MS 32

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OFDMA/SC-FDMA Basics for 3GPP LTEBS
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LTE Uplink

Power consumption in user equipment (UE) terminals is

limited by battery
OFDM requires large dynamic range due to high peak to
average power ratio (PAPR)
Linear power amplifiers with wide dynamic range have bad
efficiency
Single carrier/Frequecy division multiple access
(SC/FDMA) used for the uplink in LTE

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Comparison OFDMA vs. SC/FDMA

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SC/FDMA Distributed vs. Localized

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SC/FDMA

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Processing Steps

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PAPR comparison

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Conclusions - Part I

OFDM enables wireless communication in frequency

selective channels
Channel equalization in the frequency domain
Low complexity implementation - fast Fourier transform
(FFT) algorithms
Time and frequency diversity can be exploited
SC/FDMA is OFDM with precoding
PAPR of SC/FDMA is 2dB smaller compared to OFDMA

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Outline

Part I - OFDMA and SC/FDMA Basics

Part II - Time-variant channel estimation for OFDM
Signal model
Discrete prolate spheroidal sequences
Reduced-rank channel estimation
Mean square error (MSE) sensitivity to velocity of user
equipment

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Time-Variant Channel Estimation for

OFDM

Signal model for a single flat-fading subcarrier

q {0, . . . , N 1}
ym,q = gm,q dm,q + zm,q
ym,q C , received symbol on subcarrier q at discrete time
m {0, . . . , M 1}
zm,q C , additive noise
dm,q C data symbol

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LTE Pilot Pattern

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Reduced-Rank Channel Description

Second order statistic is unknown
Doppler bandwidth upper bounded by Dmax
Estimation per frequency-flat subcarrier q {0, . . . , N 1}

Basis Expansion

gm,q

D1
X

i,q ui,m

for

m {0, . . . , M 1} ,

DM

i=0

gm,q channel coefficient for subcarrier q at time m

ui,m basis function
i,q expansion coefficient

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Slepian Basis Expansion

D. Slepian et al. (1961,1978) asked, which sequences have
M1
P

maximum time concentration =

|um |2

m=0

|um |2

m=

while being bandlimited in [Dmax , Dmax ]

M1
X
`=0

sin(2Dmax (` m))
ui,` = i ui,m
(` m)

Discrete prolate spheroidal (DPS) sequences ui [m]

Doubly orthogonal on {, . . . , } and {0, . . . , M 1}
Subspace has dimension D 0 = d2Dmax Me + 1

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April 24, 2008

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Slepian Sequences

0.15

0.1

0.05

M = 256 block length

1/TS = 49 ks1 symbol rate

vmax = 100 km/h velocity

0.05

fC = 2 GHz carrier
0.1

0.15

u0[m]
u1[m]
u [m]
2
u [m]
3
u4[m]

D = 5 dimensions

50

100

150

200

250

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Time-Variant Channel Estimation

Signal model for a single subcarrier q

ym,q = gm,q dm,q + zm,q
ym,q C , received symbol on subcarrier q at discrete time m
zm,q C , additive noise
i,q C , basis expansion coefficient

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Time-Variant Channel Estimation

Signal model for a single subcarrier q

ym,q =

D1
X

ui,m i,q dm,q + zm,q

i=0

ym,q C , received symbol on subcarrier q at discrete time m

zm,q C , additive noise
i,q C , basis expansion coefficient

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April 24, 2008

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Pilot Based Channel Estimation (I)

ym,q =

D1
X

ui,m i,q dm,q + zm,q

i=0

Time multiplexed pilot and data symbols, dm = bm + pm

(pilots are known
at the receiver side).
bm {1 j}/ 2 for m
/ P and bm = 0 for m P
pm = {1 j}/ 2 for m P and pm = 0 for m
/P



M
M
P=
i +
| i {0, . . . , J 1}
J
2J
J pilot symbols

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Pilot Based Channel Estimation (II)

... omitting q

u0,m
..
.

Basis function vector f m =

RD ,

uD1,m
P
f
Coefficient estimates
= G 1
ym pm
m
mP

where
= [
0 , . . . , (D1) ]T and the correlation matrix
G=

flfH
l .

lP

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MSE Sensitivity to User Velocity

MSEM =

M1
o
1 X n
m |2
E |gm g
M
m=0

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Conclusions - Part II

Detailed channel information at receiver side difficult to

acquire
Discrete prolate spheroidal sequences describe the
subspace of band-limited sequences
Reduced-rank channel description using DPS sequences
allows for simple UE algorithm
Mean-square error (MSE) is practically independent of
user velocity

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