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OFDMA Tutorial - Theory, Principles, Design Considerations and Applications
OFDMA Tutorial - Theory, Principles, Design Considerations and Applications
applications
Yigal Leiba –Runcom Technologies, Ltd., Rishon-Lezion, Israel
ABSTRACT
OFDMA is a new modulation method for the 2nd generation of Broadband Wireless
Access (BWA) systems that combines both upstream access and modulation together.
OFDMA is based on modulating multiple orthogonal sub-carriers. Unlike traditional
multi-carrier modulation schemes, several transmitters of the multiple access system
modulate the sub-carriers simultaneously.
OFDMA offers up to an 18dB gain in the upstream link budget and up to a 12dB gain in
the downstream link budget relative to traditional multiple access technologies. These
gains are complemented by the capability to operate in severe non-line-of-sight
conditions. Armed with these advantages, OFDMA enables deployment of integrated
indoor BWA subscriber units (SU).
This article discusses the principals and design considerations for the downlink and
uplink operation of OFDMA based systems. The topics discussed are: SU
synchronization, media access control (MAC) layer aspects and handling of real-world
problems such as phase noise and power-amplifier (PA) backoff.
OFDM basics
0 0
-5
-5
-1 0
-2 0
-2 5 -1 5
-3 0
-2 0
-3 5
-4 0
-2 5
-4 5
-5 0 -3 0
0 5 10 15 20 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3
T i m e [m ic ro s e c o n d s ] F r e q u e n c y [M H z ]
Figure 1. Simulated delay-spread and channel frequency response for a 6MHz MMDS channel
Multi-carrier modulation techniques, specifically Orthogonal Frequency Division
Multiplexing (OFDM), are capable of operating with severe multipath, and can avoid ISI
problems associated with SC modulation techniques.
Pilot
insertion
What is OFDMA?
OFDMA is a combination of modulation scheme that resembles OFDM and a multiple
access scheme that combines TDMA and FDMA. OFDMA typically uses a FFT size
much higher than OFDM, and divides the available sub-carriers into logical groups called
sub-channels. Unlike OFDM that transmits the same amount of energy in each sub-
carrier, OFDMA may transmit different amounts of energy in each sub-channel.
To understand the OFDMA concept we can look at an example, specifically the OFDMA
specification in IEEE 802.16a draft standard ([3]). In this standard two OFDMA schemes
can be used. The mandatory OFDMA scheme is based on 2048 sub-carriers and there is
also on optional scheme based on 4096 sub-carriers. For the 2048 sub-carriers scheme, in
the uplink there are 1696 used sub-carriers. The rest of the sub-carriers are use as a guard
band to guarantee the OFDM brick-wall spectral mask. The used sub-carriers are divided
in 32 sub-channels, each containing 53 sub-carriers. SU are allocated one or more of
these sub-channels for each transmission burst. Multiple SU can access the channel
simultaneously by transmitting on different sub-channels.
In the downlink, the transmission power allocated for a sub-channel can be boosted by
6dB or attenuated by 6dB relative to the nominal transmission power. The transmission
power of all the sub-channels has to be conserved, therefore boosting one sub-channel
implies attenuating another.
Figure 3 illustrates how multiple SU transmit simultaneously on different sub-channels in
an OFDMA uplink.
OFDMA Symbol #1 OFDMA Symbol #2 OFDMA Symbol #3 OFDMA Symbol #4
GI GI GI GI
Group #1
Group #2
(sub-carrier)
Frequency
SS #1
SS #2
SS #1 SS #1 SS #1 SS #1 SS #3
SS #4
SS #5 SS #5 SS #5 SS #2 SS #5
SS #6
SS #4 SS #4
SS #3 SS #3 SS #6 SS #6
SS #2 SS #2
-5
-1 0
Normalized S/N [dB]
-1 5
-2 0
-2 5
-3 0
-3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3
F re q u e nc y [M H z]
Channel estimation
In the downlink, channel estimation takes advantage of another sort of pilot-carriers
called ‘moving-pilots’. These sub-carriers, whose location changes every OFDMA
symbol according to a fixed pattern, are modulated with a known in advance sequence.
The receiver locates the moving-pilots and can estimate the channel at the frequency of
each pilot by comparing the expected pilot the value to the measured value. Extrapolating
the data obtained from the moving-pilots enables the channel estimation and elimination
of any phase noise errors that are common to all the sub-carriers.
In the uplink, channel estimation is based on a preamble, as well as on the moving-pilots.
The preamble duration is one OFDMA symbol.
OFDMA hurdles
In spite of its many advantages, OFDM modulation has been considered for a long time
costly to implement from an RF point of view. Two main reasons for this are phase noise
requirements and power amplifier (PA) linearity requirements.
Phase noise
Any oscillator used in an RF chain contains spectral components at frequencies other
than its intended oscillation frequency. These spectral components are generally referred
to as ‘phase noise’. A typical VCO embedded in a phase locked feedback loop (PLL) will
exhibit a noise spectrum that is flat up to the loop bandwidth, and decreases at
20dB/decade above the loop bandwidth ([7]). The one-sided phase noise curve can be
approximated by the formula,
P0
P( f ) = 2 (1)
1+ f
B
Where B is the loop bandwidth, and P0 determines how good is the VCO.
To see how phase noise affects an OFDM receiver, we can look at a simple case where
the channel is not frequency selective. We can use the following formula ([8]),
j N −1
j N −1 N −1
2π
yk ≈ sk + ⋅ s k ∑ φ (m ) + ∑ s r ∑ φ (m ) ⋅ exp j (r − k )m (2)
N m =0 N r =0 m =0 N
r ≠k
Where N is the number of OFDMA bins, y k is the received symbol in bin k, s k is the
transmitted symbol in bin k, and exp{ j ⋅ φ (m )} is the local oscillator (LO) impaired by
phase noise. What can be understood from this formula is that the phase noise is
composed from two components, one is a component that is common to all sub-carriers
bins within a OFDMA symbol, and another that is not common an creates interference
and loss of orthogonality between the sub-carriers. The common component can be
compensated for, as it is common to the known pilot-carriers.
Now we can attempt to derive the required phase noise performance from the LO ([9]).
For a typical 6MHZ MMDS channel, the OFDMA symbol duration specified in IEEE
802.16a draft standard ([3]) is 298 23 µS , meaning that only noise components above
3.5KHz have to be considered when calculating the phase noise. Integrating over
equation (1) results in
∞
π f
N PN = ∫ P( f ) ⋅ df = P0 ⋅ B ⋅ − arctan 0 (3)
f0 2 B
If we choose for instance B=1KHz, we can draw a limiting curves for the LO phase noise
performance based on a minimum C/N due to phase noise alone, that is 6dB below the
minimum C/N threshold (see [6], Annex A). The 6dB below the minimum C/N threshold
creates an equivalent noise degradation (END) of 1dB. We require C/N of 27.7dB for
QAM-64 at FEC rate ¾, 22.7dB for 16-QAM at FEC rate ¾ and 11.4dB for QPSK at
FEC rate ½. These C/N figures are for a Rayleigh channel. The resulting limiting curves
shown in Figure 5,
-30
-40
-50
Phase noise level [dBc/Hz]
-60
-70 QPSK
-80
16-QAM
-90
64-QAM
-100
-110 2 3 4 5 6
10 10 10 10 10
Frequency [Hz]
PA linearity
When feeding a linear PA with a constant envelope waveform such as a sine wave, the
PA is only linear up to some specified output power, above which it becomes saturated
and cannot be considered linear anymore. When the PA is fed with a waveform that does
not have a constant envelope, it only saturates on the momentary power peaks of this
waveform and remains linear for the rest of the time. If the ratio between the waveform
peak power to its average power (PAPR) is high, the requirement that the amplifier does
not saturate on the waveform peaks causes the average power output by the amplifier to
be well below the peak power it can handle. The ratio between the peak power the PA
can handle to its actual operating point as determined by the PAPR is called backoff. As
PA cost rises with its peak handling power capability, modulations with high PAPR are
considered inefficient in their use of the PA.
Narrowband channels
Efficient operation with narrowband channels is one of the major challenges in the design
of a BWA system. An example where this challenge is met in reality might be a BWA
uplink operating in a 6MHz MMDS channel at 16QAM, where the uplink can burst to
about 15Mbps, while a single voice over IP (VOIP) channel requires only 8Kbps. To
understand the reason for the inefficiency we can assume that an SU transmits 10 bytes of
data every 10mS. The transmission of these bytes, and additional 10 bytes of protocol
overhead will take about 10 µS . To this figure we need to add a preamble for the modem,
and a guard interval between transmissions. The duration of both these intervals is
proportional to the channel peak delay spread. Even if we substitute the conservative
number of 5µS for each, we arrive at an efficiency of 50%.
With OFDMA parallel processing capability the situation is much better. For instance,
suppose a SU requiring a VOIP service is assigned one sub-channel out of the 32
available in IEEE 802.16a draft standard ([3]). The duration of the data transmission will
now be 32 times longer, namely 320µS , while the overhead remains the same. The
efficiency will now be 97%.
Interference immunity
An OFDMA system is fairly resistant to most forms of external interference. A narrow-
band interference source for example, might block some of the OFDMA sub-carriers.
However, due to the fact that OFDMA sub-channels use sub-carriers spread across the
entire frequency band, and due to the robust FEC scheme, this loss of sub-carriers will
generally not introduce significant errors. A broadband bursty interference source may
block reception for a short while. In spite of this, the long duration of each OFDMA
symbol, and the FEC block interleaving over several OFDMA symbols will prevent
significant errors from this type of interference source as well.
When interference in the BST between OFDMA system cells is concerned, OFDMA
behaves very much like frequency hopping spread-spectrum (FHSS) system. In each cell
of an OFDMA system, the OFDMA sub-carriers are divided in N G groups (see Figure 3).
The OFDMA sub-channels are composed of different sub-carriers, such that one sub-
carrier is selected from each group and the number of sub-carriers in a sub-channel is
N SUB −CHN . Typically, a SU that is the victim of interference transmits on a random sub-
channel. The interfering SU at another BST does the same in statistically independent
manner.
The probability of collision in K out of the sub-carriers is given by,
K NG − K
NG 1 1
P(K ) =
⋅
⋅ 1 − N
(4)
K N
SUB−CHN SUB −CHN
Conclusions
OFDMA works reliably in severe multipath environments encountered under non line of
sight propagation conditions. OFDMA can provide system gains up to 18dB in the
uplink, and 12dB in the downlink relative to traditional modulation schemes.
Consequently, OFDMA achieves superior coverage, and is potentially the modulation
and multiple-access scheme that will enable outdoor-to-indoor operation. Outdoor to
indoor operation substantially reduces SU installation and distribution costs, and enables
mass deployment of BWA systems.
OFDMA is an optimal solution for 2nd generation BWA networks. This technology is
cost-effective, standards-based and practical. Solving the phase-noise and PA linearity
problems in OFDM is comparable to solving it in traditional modulation schemes, and
does not significantly affect implementation costs. Since OFDMA is incorporated into the
DVB-RCT and IEEE 802.16a (draft) standards, the prices of OFDMA related
technologies are expected to drop. OFDMA technology is not just a theoretical technique,
FPGA based OFDMA systems from Runcom are already operating successfully in
several α sites worldwide. Commercial ASIC’s and modules will be available in 2002.
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