Interference Analysis in Time and Frequency

Asynchronous Network MIMO OFDM Systems

Vincent Kotzsch and Gerhard Fettweis
Vodafone Chair Mobile Communications Systems, TU-Dresden, Germany
Email: {vincent.kotzsch, fettweis}@ifn.et.tu-dresden.de
AbstractIt is well known that symbol timing offsets larger
than the cyclic prex as well as carrier frequency offsets between
transmitter and receiver stations destroy the orthogonality among
OFDM subcarriers and induce additional interference. In con-
junction with MIMO transmission on frequency selective fading
channels where different users interfere with each other, these
effects strongly degrades the signal detection performance. In
this paper we consider fully asynchronous spatially multiplexed
transmission with different symbol timing and carrier frequency
offsets on each transmitter-receiver link which appear in dis-
tributed MIMO systems with multiple users and base stations.
We derive a factorized system model for signal transmission in
frequency domain where the different effects of inter-carrier,
inter-symbol and inter-block interference are separated and an-
alyzed in terms of signal-to-interference-noise-ratio degradation.
Finally, we evaluate the interference levels at a receiver station
for different link-level as well as system-level simulation setups.
I. INTRODUCTION
It has been shown in many publications that the orthogonal
frequency division multiplex (OFDM) modulation scheme in
multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems is a promising
candidate to full requirements for achieving high spectral
efciency at adequate computational effort (e.g. [1], [2]).
In recent standardisation processes OFDM has been chosen
for application in cellular mobile communications, namely
orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA). In
conjunction with space division multiple access (SDMA) tech-
niques it is possible to assign time-frequency-space resources
to users fairly exibly (e.g. [3]). In such systems, separate base
stations (BS) and user terminals (UT) suffer from inaccuracies
in terms of synchronization mismatches in time and frequency
(e.g. [4], [2]). Symbol timing offsets (STO) between users are
caused by propagation delays through transmission channels.
Carrier frequency offsets (CFO) occur due to unsynchronized
local oscillators at each UT in the network as well as Doppler
shifts from relative movements w.r.t to the BS respectively.
Approaches for future mobile communication systems include
clusters of base stations that work in a cooperative manner
in order to improve the spectral efciency in cellular environ-
ments (e.g. [3]). In such distributed systems there are high
requirements on the time/frequency alignment of the users to
the BS network to achieve the anticipated gains.
There has been a lot of work in the eld of the interference
analysis in order to describe the effects of STOs and CFOs
so far (e.g. [2], [5], [6]), as well as to understand the effects
of insufcient CP length in the case of large STOs (e.g. [7],
[8], [9]), but often there are limitations in such a way that
it is difcult to map a asynchronous network MIMO OFDM
system to the existing error models. In this paper, we provide
a generalized frequency domain transmission model where K
asynchronous users transmit their data over the same channel
resource and will be received by M asynchronous base sta-
tions. We derive a convenient approximation for the overall
interference power that includes the effects of STOs, CFOs
and insufcient CP length, which is used for an extensive
interference analysis.
The paper is organized as follows: In section II we derive
our network MIMO OFDM system model. A SINR approxi-
mation for all subcarriers is given in section III. Performance
evaluations and simulation results are provided in section IV,
before in section V concluding remarks summarize the main
results.
Notation: Boldface letters denote matrices and underlined
letters vectors respectively. We use [.] for indexing an element
of a vector or matrix. Lowercase letters describe variables in
the time domain and uppercase letters variables in frequency
domain respectively. (.)
T
is used as transpose and (.)
H
as
conjugate transpose operator. The operator E(.) expresses the
expectation value.
II. SYSTEM MODEL
We consider the uplink of a cellular system with K active
users which are connected to their serving base station each.
For the joint multi-user detection process we use a cluster of
base stations which receive the user signals at an appropriate
power level. The users simultaneously transmit their data on
a set of OFDM subcarriers D in frequency domain. In order
to avoid OFDM inter-symbol interference (ISI) and self inter-
carrier interference (ICI) we use a cyclic prex (CP) of N
CP
samples. As a result one OFDM symbol block consists then
of N
B
= N +N
CP
time domain samples. The representation
of the base band signal for user k is given as IDFT operation:
x
k
i
[n] =
1

lD
X
k
i
[l] e
j2ln
N
, N
CP
n N 1 (1)
where X
k
i
[l] = 0 l / D and N represents the DFT size. The
OFDM symbol index is denoted by i = 0, ..., N
S
1. After
the transmission over the channel with the impulse response
vector h which consists of L discrete channel taps, the signal
This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the WCNC 2010 proceedings.
978-1-4244-6398-5/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE
(a)
R
R
d
32
d
31
R
C
d
23
d
21
d
13
d
12
#2
#1
#3
#1
#3
#2
(b)
t=0
UT #1:
(desired)
UT #2:
UT #3:
Rx DFT Windows:
Inter-carrier interference (ICI)
from current windowed symbol
Multi-user
interference
(MUI)
Symbol i Symbol (i-1)
t
CP CP

x2

x3
Inter-symbol interference (ISI)
from previous symbol

x1
Fig. 1: Geometrical System Model and Timing Mismatches
at the mth receiver branch can be obtained by:
r
m
i
[n] =
K

k=1

=1
h
m,k
[]x
k
i
[n
m,k
]

e
j
m,k
i
[n]

+v
m
i
[n] (2)
where v
m
i
[n] N
c
(0,
2
v
) incorporates spatially and tempo-
rally uncorrelated AWGN.
m,k
=
k

m
implies the
phase rotation error between the up and the down conversion
process and
m,k
the integer symbol timing offset on the link
between the kth user terminal and the mth base station. If
n
m,k
< 0 the previous samples within x
k
i1
are used.
In our simulation model
m,k
mainly occurs due to the
propagation delays between the users and the base stations.
Usually in cellular networks the base stations work in a
synchronous manner and the users will be aligned via a timing
advance which is estimated user specic by the base stations
and transmitted via the downlink control channels. Therefore
the users can be aligned within the range of the cyclic prex
duration minus the maximum channel excess delay w.r.t the
sample period T
S
:
N
CP,eff
=

T
CP,eff
T
S

T
CP

max
T
S

(3)
which is henceforth referred to as effective CP length. Since
we want to employ a coherent reception at all base stations this
constraint will only hold in a certain area where the users are
symmetrically grouped. Otherwise a timing behaviour occurs
as depicted in Fig. 1b. If timing offsets larger than the CP
length occur ( > N
CP
) we will catch ISI from the previous
OFDM symbol which consists of the channel decay effect
and the time domain windowing of the previous symbol.
Due to the distortion of the orthogonality of the desired
OFDM symbol subcarriers we will also get ICI from current
windowed symbol.
In Eq. (2)
m,k
i
[n] represents the CFO effect that also
caused ICI and corresponds to a linear phase process for each
link:

m,k
i
[n] = 2 f
m,k
n T
S
+
m,k
0
(4)
In reduced units the CFO f
m,k
is normalized to the subcar-
rier spacing B
SC
which leads with nT
S
=
n
NBSC
to:

m,k
i
[n] = 2
m,k
n
N
+
m,k
0
(5)
with
m,k
= f
m,k
/B
SC
. If OFDM symbols are transmit-
ted consecutively
0
is given as
0
=
m,k
i1
[N 1]. Unless
otherwise stated we always use the differential CFO values in
the following.
Within this work we assume time invariant channel
impulse responses (CIR) with taps modelled as
h
m,k
[] N
c
(0,
2
h[]

m,k
PL
) each with variance

2
h[]

m,k
PL
= E

|h
m,k
[]|
2

and a sum power of

2
H
m,k
=
m,k
PL

L
=1

2
h[]
. In order to take the user
positions and the resulting STOs into account we include a
simplied distance dependent path-loss on each link which
can be approximated by:

m,k
PL
= B
PL

d
m,k
d
0

PL
(6)
where
PL
represents the path-loss exponent and B
PL
a
constant that contains certain propagations effects.
With l D the received signal at the lth subcarrier in
frequency domain is obtained by the DFT operation applied
to the received samples r
m
i
[n] at the mth base station:
Y
m
i
[l] =
1

N
N1

n=0
r
m
i
[n] e
j2ln
N
(7)
If we use the matrix vector notation we can rewrite the
transmission equation for the synchronous case to:
Y
m
i
=
K

k=1

F
Rx
h
m,k

Tx
F
H
. .. .
H
m,k
X
k
i

+ F
Rx
v
m
. .. .
V
m
(8)
where F C
NN
represents the Fourier matrix with the
entries F[l, n] = e
j
2
N
l n
/

N, h C
NBNB
includes
the CIR matrix in Toeplitz structure with the rst column
[h
1
h
L
0 0]
T
. Due to the insertion of the CP by using the
This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the WCNC 2010 proceedings.
CP adding matrix
Tx
=

[0 I
NCP
]
T
I
N

T
N
NBN
and
the CP removing matrix
Rx
= [0 I
N
] N
NNB
, h becomes
circulant and H C
NN
then represents a diagonal matrix
with the SISO channel transfer function (CTF) in frequency
domain which can also be stated as H = diag (F h).
Considering link specic STOs
(
m,k
> N
CP
) suitable shift matrices

m,k
= [I
NB
]
0
m,k ;
m,k
Prev
= [I
NB
]
0(NB
m,k
)

N
NBNB
are induced where the operator []
0
m,k expresses
a vertical downshift at which on the upper part
m,k
zero rows are inserted and []
0(NB
m,k
)
vice versa.
Furthermore we insert CFO phase distortions on each
link which are represented within diagonal CFO matrices

m,k
i
= diag(e
j
m,k
i
[n]
) C
NBNB
. With these extensions
we can rewrite Eq. (8) to:
Y
m
i
=
K

k=1
( F
Rx

m,k
i

m,k

m,k
h
m,k

Tx
F
H
X
k
i
+ F
Rx

m,k
i

m,k
Prev

m,k
Prev
h
m,k

Tx
F
H
X
k
i1
)
+ F
Rx
v
m
(9)
where
m,k
Prev
includes the ISI of the previous win-
dowed OFDM symbol. In Eq. (9) we also included

m,k
,
m,k
Prev
N
NBNB
as diagonal link window matri-
ces with
m,k
=

[0 0]
T

0 I
NB
m,k

T
and
m,k
Prev
=

m,k 0

T
[0 0]
T

T
. In this case we are not restricted to
shift in zero rows within
m,k
and
m,k
Prev
and can shift in rows
with arbitrary values as well. In order to isolate the different
interference effects in frequency domain we can split Eq. (9)
by inserting the identity matrix I
NB
=
Tx

Rx
+ b:
Y
m
i
=
K

k=1
( F
Rx

m,k
i

m,k

Tx

Rx

m,k
h
m,k

Tx
F
H
X
k
i
+ F
Rx

m,k
i

m,k
b
m,k
h
m,k

Tx
. .. .
0
F
H
X
k
i
...
Without prove we state that due to the structure of the used
matrices the terms which are coupled via b are equal to zero.
We can apply further splittings to obtain:
Y
m
i
=
K

k=1
( F
Rx

m,k
i

m,k

Tx
F
H
. .. .
E
m,k
i
F
Rx

m,k

Tx
F
H
. .. .

m,k
F
Rx
h
m,k

Tx
F
H
. .. .
H
m,k
X
k
i
+ F
Rx

m,k
i

m,k
Prev

Tx
F
H
. .. .
E
m,k
i,Prev
F
Rx

m,k
Prev

Tx
F
H
. .. .

m,k
Prev
F
Rx
h
m,k

Tx
F
H
. .. .
H
m,k
X
k
i1
)
+ F
Rx
v
m
. .. .
V
m
(10)
In Eq. (10), besides the known phase rotation matrices and
the CTF matrices H, we can also compute the ICI/ISI matrices
E
m,k
i
and E
m,k
i,Prev
for
m,k
N
CP
by applying the spectral
theorem with a column of the Fourier matrix f
n
:
E
m,k
i
=
N1

n=
m,k
NCP

m,k
i
[n +N
CP
, n +N
CP
] f
n
f
H
n
E
m,k
i
[l, p] =
1
N
N1

n=
m,k
NCP
e
j
m,k
i
[n+NCP ]
e
j2n
N
(pl)
E
m,k
i
[l, p] =
1
N
e
j2(iN
B
+N
CP
)
N

m,k
e
j2
N
(
m,k
NCP )
m,k
NB
m,k
1

n=0
e
j2n
N

m,k
E
m,k
i,Prev
[l, p] =
1
N
e
j2(iN
B
+N
CP
)
N

m,k

m,k
NCP 1

n=0
e
j2n
N

m,k
or equivalently as a Dirichlet kernel
E
m,k
i
[l, p] =

NB
m,k
N

m,k
= 0
1
N
e
j
N
i
sin(

m,k
N
(NB
m,k
))
sin

m,k
N

otherwise
E
m,k
i,Prev
[l, p] =

m,k
NCP
N

m,k
= 0
1
N
e
j
N
i,Prev
sin(

m,k
N
(
m,k
NCP ))
sin

m,k
N

otherwise
with
m,k
=
m,k
+p l l, p = 1...N and:

i
= 2(iN
B
+N
CP
)
m,k
+ 2
m,k
(
m,k
N
CP
)
+
m,k
N(N
B

m,k
1)

i,Prev
= 2(iN
B
+N
CP
)
m,k
+
m,k
(
m,k
N
CP
1)
The problem in Eq. (8) is that the circularity of the
effective CIR matrix

h
m,k
=
Rx
h
m,k

Tx
only holds for
a channel length of L N
CP
+ 1. Otherwise in the case
that the maximum excess delay
max
is larger than the CP
(L > N
CP
+ 1),

h
m,k
is no longer circulant and self ICI and
furthermore ISI from the previous OFDM symbol will occur.
In order to include also this effect of ISI in our transmission
model we form a upper triangular Toeplitz matrix h
m,k
ISI
with
the rst row

0 0 h
m,k
L
h
m,k
2

. With h
m,k
ISI
x
m
i1
we can
model the ISI from the previous OFDM symbol. Another goal
is to keep

h
m,k
circulant. Therefore we add the ISI part to the
CIR matrix h with respect to the CP length such that Eq. (8)
can be rewritten to:
Y
m
i
=
K

k=1
( F
Rx

h
m,k
+ h
m,k
ISI

Tx
F
H
. .. .
H
m,k
=diag(Fh
m,k
)
X
k
i
F
Rx
h
m,k
ISI

Tx
F
H
X
k
i
+ F
Rx
h
m,k
ISI

Tx
F
H
X
k
i1
) +V
m
(11)
where h
m,k
ISI
=
CP
h
m,k
ISI
represents a left shift to skip the
effect of the CP add and remove matrices.
This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the WCNC 2010 proceedings.
If we combine Eq. (10) and Eq. (11) we get a equation
for the frequency domain transmission of data symbols over
frequency selective channels with different STOs and CFOs
on each link:
Y
m
i
=
K

k=1
( E
m,k
i

m,k
F
Rx

h
m,k
+ h
m,k
ISI

Tx
F
H
. .. .
H
m,k
=diag(Fh
m,k
)
X
k
i
E
m,k
i
F
Rx

m,k
h
m,k
ISI

Tx
F
H
. .. .
H
m,k
ISI

X
k
i
+ E
m,k
i,Prev

m,k
Prev
F
Rx

h
m,k
+ h
m,k
ISI

Tx
F
H
. .. .
H
m,k
=diag(Fh
m,k
)
X
k
i1
E
m,k
i,Prev
F
Rx

m,k
Prev
h
m,k
ISI

Tx
F
H
. .. .
0
X
k
i1
+ E
m,k
i
F
Rx

m,k
h
m,k
ISI

Tx
F
H
. .. .
H
m,k
ISI
X
k
i1
) +V
m
(12)
We can also rewrite Eq. (12) with respect to the lth subcarrier:
Y
m
i
[l] =
K

k=1

E
m,k
i
[l, l]H
m,k
[l, l]X
k
i
[l]e
j
2
N

m,k
l

. .. .
YU
+
K

k=1

pD,p=l

E
m,k
i
[l, p]H
m,k
[p, p]X
k
i
[p]e
j
2
N

m,k
p

. .. .
YICI
+
K

k=1

pD

E
m,k
i,Prev
[l, p]H
m,k
[p, p]X
k
i1
[p]e
j
2
N
(
m,k
NCP )p

. .. .
YISI

k=1

pD

N1

q=0
E
m,k
i
[l, q]H
m,k
ISI
[q, l]

X
k
i
[p]
. .. .
Y
ICI

+
K

k=1

pD

N1

q=0
E
m,k
i
[l, q]H
m,k
ISI
[q, l]

X
k
i1
[p]
. .. .
Y
ISI

+V
m
[l]
(13)
III. SINR ANALYSIS
For the SINR analysis of the received signal the focus of our
interest is on the interference terms in Eq. (13) which represent
the impact of inter-carrier and inter-symbol interference. If we
assume that we use an advanced receiver where the spatial
interference among users Y
U
can be cancelled the SINR on
the lth subcarrier at the mth receiver branch
m
l
is given by:

m
l
=
E

|Y
U
|
2

|Y
ICI
+Y
ISI
Y
ICI
+Y
ISI
+V [l]|
2

K
k=1

E
m,k
i
[l, l]

2
H
m,k

2
X

K
k=1

m,k
l
+
2
V
(14)
If we dene that all channels and data symbols are uncorre-
lated
m,k
l
can be denoted as:

m,k
l
=
2
H
m,k
2
X

pD,p=l

E
m,k
i
[l, p]

2
+

pD

E
m,k
i,Prev
[l, p]

+ 2
2
X

2
H
m,k
ISI

pD

E
m,k
i
[l, p]

2
=
2
H
m,k
2
X

1
1
N
2
sin
2
(
m,k

m,k
)
sin
2

m,k
N

+ 2
2
X

2
H
m,k
ISI

m,k
(15)
with the denition for
m,k
:

m,k
=

NB
m,k
N

m,k
> N
CP
1 N
CP,eff
<
m,k
N
CP
0 0
m,k
N
CP,eff
For the ISI power caused by the channel decay we use the
following approximation:

2
H
m,k
ISI
=
1
N
L

=2+
( 1 )
2
h[]

m,k
PL
(16)
=

0
m,k
> N
CP
N
CP

m,k
N
CP,eff
<
m,k
N
CP
(17)
In the special case where the STOs are in the range of the CP
(
m,k
= 0) Eq. (15) simplies to the known solution:

m,k
l
=
2
H
m,k
2
X

1
1
N
2
sin
2
(
m,k
)
sin
2

m,k
N

(18)
In the other case of ideal CFO synchronization (
m,k
= 0) Eq.
(15) changes to:

m,k
l
=
2
X

2
H
m,k

m,k

+ 2
2
X

2
H
m,k
ISI

m,k
(19)
For the interference analysis the SNR degradation will also
be of interest and can be stated as the ratio:

Loss
=

ideal

real
(20)

m
Loss
=

2
H
m,k

2
X

2
V

2
ICI,m
+
2
V

2
H
m,k

2
X
(21)

m
Loss
=
1

1 +

2
ICI,m

2
V

,
m
=
K

k=1

E
m,k
i
[l, l]

2
(22)
with
2
ICI,m
=

K
k=1

m,k
l
.
This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the WCNC 2010 proceedings.
TABLE I: Simulation Parameters
Parameter Value
Carrier Frequency f
C
2.5GHz
System Bandwidth B
S
= 1/T
S
15.36MHz
FFT Size N 1024
Used Subcarrier N
SC
1024
CP Length N
CP
72
User Transmit Antenna No. 1
BS Receive Antenna No. 1
User Power
2
X
23dBm
Path-loss Coefcient
PL
3.86
Propagation Environment Factor 10 log(B
PL
) 14.2dB
Noise Power per Subcarrier
2
V
-132dBm
IV. SIMULATION RESULTS
In this section, we compare the effect of the different
interference sources in a cellular network MIMO system. The
basic simulation parameters are listed in Tab. I. In order to vary
the channel length and so the maximum excess delay between
the simulations we use an parametrizable exponential channel
power delay prole with the following tap variances:

2
h[]
=
1

e
(1)

, = 1...L . (23)
with

L
=1

2
h[]
= 1. We dene the last tap shall to be
20dB below the rst one by setting the RMS delay spread
to

=
L1
ln(0.01)
.
Firstly, we want to separate the effects of the CFO and the
STO. Therefore we consider a SISO system with one user
(K = 1) and one base station (M = 1) where we omit the
path-loss (
m,k
PL
= 1) and only increase and at different
SNR levels. In Fig. 2 we can see that the SNR loss strongly
depends on the current noise level. In Fig. 3 the effect of the
STO is depicted for different channel lengths L in order to
illustrate the effect of ISI from the previous OFDM symbol. If
the STO is not within the range of the effective CP we observe
the ISI due to the channel decay effect. Looking at the curve
for a at channel (L = 1) we clearly see the effect of ISI due
to the time domain windowing of the OFDM symbols in the
case that the STO is larger than the CP length. Furthermore
we can see a strong dependence on the SNR level again.
Secondly, we include the effect of the path-loss within
our simulations and evaluate the timing differences due to
propagation delays, which depend on the distance between the
user and the base station. As a result, the signal attenuations
and also the SNR depend on the distance level. In this context
we rst analyze the scenario when one user moves from a
base station away at certain distances d
1,1
= d
BSUT
and the
resulting timing difference is not compensated by any timing
advance mechanism. Based on the known distance we can
get the propagation delay for the user link, which has to be
sampled w.r.t. the symbol period T
S
by applying:

1,1
=

d
1,1
c
Light
T
S

(24)
0 0.02 0.04 0.06 0.08 0.1
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16

L
o
s
s


[
d
B
]


SNR=10dB ,L=1
SNR=15dB ,L=1
SNR=20dB ,L=1
SNR=25dB ,L=1
SNR=30dB ,L=1
Fig. 2: SNR Degradation due to increasing CFO
0 0.5 1 1.5
0
5
10
15
20
/ N
CP

L
o
s
s


[
d
B
]


L=0.75 N
CP
L=0.5 N
CP
L=0.25 N
CP
L=1
SNR=20dB
SNR=30dB
SNR=10dB
Fig. 3: SNR Degradation due to increasing STO
As a result we get a mapping of the user distance d
m,k
to the
resulting STO which is evaluated within the simulations. All
the propagation and environment effects are included within
B
PL
and based on the path-loss model in [10]. We assume
an average building height of 10m, a BS antenna height of
35m, an UT height of 1.5m and a street width of 20m at a
reference distance of d
0
= 1m. We repeat this transmission
for different channel lengths once without a CFO and once
at a CFO level of 0.5% of subcarrier spacing which leads to
the absoult CFO of 75Hz. Note that we do not consider power
control at all such that large SNR levels near to the base station
can occur. The resulting SNR loss is depicted in Fig. 4 where
we normalized d
BSUT
w.r.t the distance d
CP
= T
CP
c
Light
which is covered by the CP. As we already discussed above,
close to the base station we can observe a higher sensitivity to
the CFO because at high SNR values the effect of the CFO is
amplied, which is also visible in Fig. 2. It should be noted
that in the SISO case all timing problems can be solved by
smart timing advance algorithms.
In the network MIMO case where we assume coherent
reception in the UL this is usually not the case. Therefore
in the next scenario we assume a system with three users
(K = 3) and three base stations (M = 3) as depicted in
Fig. 1a. Now the users move from the cell corner towards
This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the WCNC 2010 proceedings.
their serving base stations in a symmetrical manner. Within
this symmetrical setup the users are always on a circle with
radius R
C
. The distance from the direct user to his serving
base station can be obtained by:
d
k,k
= R R
C
, k = m (25)
The distance between one user to the non serving base station
can be calculated by taking the hexagonal cell structure into
account and can be stated as:
d
m,k
= R

1 +
R
C
R
+
R
2
C
R
2
, k = m . (26)
In order to have a more realistic simulation we assume that
the base stations now apply a timing advance mechanism
where the propagation delays caused by the direct link can
be compensated. In this context we only consider the timing
differences between the direct user link and the links from
the other two users at one base station which can not be
compensated by the timing advance. The timing differences
between the direct and non direct link can be obtained by:
=
1,2

1,1
(27)
which is then used as effective STO. In Fig. 5 the results are
shown for increasing R
C
. We omit the CFO in this simulation
because from Fig. 4 we can derive that the CFO is not the
dominant effect at the cell border. An important result of Fig.
5 is that even in the at channel case (L = 1) the CP can
only cover 60% of its actual range due to the non-compensable
timing differences between the users. As expected, we can see
that the user radius where we can apply a coherent reception at
the base stations is strongly limited by the channel maximum
excess delay and the CP length.
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper we present a network MIMO OFDM system
model which includes the effects of carrier frequency offsets
as well as the effects of symbol timing offsets in frequency
selective channels with a nite channel length. We derive a
closed form expression for calculating the SINR for several
scenarios. We analyze the SINR level under different channel
conditions with and without including the effect of the channel
path-loss. We seen that the region where coherent reception
can be applied is limited by channel length and the cyclic
prex and that the main interference is caused by the timing
mismatches between the user and the base stations. In a further
work we will evaluate smart timing advance algorithm on
which we can extend the user radius where network MIMO
is benecial.
VI. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The authors acknowledge the excellent cooperation with all
project partners within the EASY-C project and the support
by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research
(BMBF). Thanks also to E. Ohlmer and W. Rave for inspiring
discussions.
0 0.5 1 1.5 2
0
1
2
3
4
d
BSUT
/ d
CP

L
o
s
s


[
d
B
]


=0 ,L=0.75 N
CP
=0 ,L=0.5 N
CP
=0 ,L=0.25 N
CP
=0 ,L=1
=0.005 ,L=0.75 N
CP
=0.005 ,L=0.5 N
CP
=0.005 ,L=0.25 N
CP
=0.005 ,L=1
Fig. 4: Interference Power in a Cellular SISO Setup
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
0
0.5
1
1.5
2
R
C
/ d
CP

L
o
s
s


[
d
B
]


=0 ,L=0.75 N
CP
=0 ,L=0.5 N
CP
=0 ,L=0.25 N
CP
=0 ,L=1
Fig. 5: Interference Power in a Cellular Network MIMO Setup
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