2014 IEEE 2014 International Conference on Computer, Communication, and Control Technology (I4CT 2014), September 2 4, 2014 - Langkawi,

Kedah, Malaysia

Comparison the Performance of OFDM System

Based on Multiwavelet Transform with Different
Modulation Schemes
Sameer A.Dawood

F. Malek

School of computer and communication engineering

University Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP)
Pauh Putra, 02000 Arau, Perlis, Malaysia
sameerakram_iraq@yahoo.com

School of electrical system engineering

University Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP)
Pauh Putra, 02000 Arau, Perlis, Malaysia
mfareq@unimap.edu.my

M. S. Anuar

Rashid A. Fayadh

School of computer and communication engineering

University Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP)
Pauh Putra, 02000 Arau, Perlis, Malaysia
anuarms@unimap.edu.my

School of computer and communication engineering

University Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP)
Pauh Putra, 02000 Arau, Perlis, Malaysia
r_rashid47@yahoo.com

Farah Salwani Abdullah

Mohd Hariz Mohd Fakri

School of electrical system engineering

University Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP)
Pauh Putra, 02000 Arau, Perlis, Malaysia
farrahsalwani@unimap.edu.my

School of electrical system engineering

University Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP)
Pauh Putra, 02000 Arau, Perlis, Malaysia
harizfaizal@unimap.edu.my
symbol, the inter-symbol interference (ISI) and inter-carrier
interference (ICI) will be eliminated. Therefore, OFDM has a
strong capability to reduce ISI and ICI in multipath fading
channel due to the orthogonality of each OFDM sub-carrier
and CP [2].
Many studies appeared recently to improve the
performance of OFDM system and reducing the bandwidth
waste, produced by introducing CP. The way is done by
replacing the FFT transform by any other transforms such as
discrete wavelet transform (DWT) [3], discrete wavelet packet
transform (DWPT) [4], and slantlet transform (SLT) [5].
In this paper, discrete multiwavelet transform (DMWT) is
proposed to be used instead of FFT to obtain better
performance for OFDM system. It has two low-pass and highpass filters. The objective of this multiplicity is to achieve
more properties which cannot be combined with other
transforms such as Fourier and Wavelet.
A very significant multi-wavelet filter is the GHM filter
suggested by Geronimo, Hardian, and Massopust. In GHM, the
low-pass and high-pass filters coefficients are 2*2 matrices,
and during transformation step they must multiply vectors
(instead of scalars). This means that multi-filter bank need 2
input rows, where this can be done by preprocessing the input
signal [6]. An over-sampling preprocessing will be used here
because it's suitable in the case of one-dimensional signal.
The major objective of this paper is to present the
commonly used digital modulation schemes in wireless
communication systems, demonstrate the performances of the

Abstract Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing

(OFDM) is a very interesting approach for high data rate
transmission in a multipath fading environment that leads to
intersymbol interference (ISI). In this paper, two steps are used
to improve the error rate performance of OFDM system. First,
the discrete multiwavelet transform (DMWT) is proposed instead
of fast Fourier transform (FFT) to obtain high orthogonality
between subcarriers and hence reduce (ISI). Second, the
performance of OFDM based on DMWT is examined for
different modulation schemes such as M-PSK (M-ary phase shift
keying) and M-QAM (M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation)
to achieve high data rate. The simulation results demonstrated
that, for high capacity data rate transmission, the M-QAM
modulation is better than the M-PSK modulation.
Index TermsOFDM, multi-wavelet, PSK, QAM, digital
modulation, fading channel.

I. INTRODUCTION
The progress in the use of information networks has led to
the need for new communication strategy with higher data
rates. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a
highly effective modulation technique used to obtain a high
data rate with high bandwidth efficiency [1]. In OFDM system,
a high data rate stream is divided into parallel low data rate
stream that are transmitted together over a number of
subcarriers which are independent and orthogonal. The fast
Fourier transform (FFT) is used to satisfy the orthogonality
between subcarriers and reduce the implementation
complexity. By adding cyclic prefix (CP) into each OFDM

978-1-4799-4555-9/14/$31.00 2014 IEEE

403

M-PSK and M-QAM modulated systems with OFDM based on

DMWT in the presence of a multi-path fading channel.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II
introduce the proposed system for OFDM based on DMWT.
Section III discusses the simulation results and conclusions are
presented in section IV.

T =

II. PROPOSED SYSTEM FOR OFDM-DMWT

Fig. 1, shows the block diagram of the proposed OFDMDMWT system.
At the transmitter, The serial binary data is first grouped,
and mapped according to the modulation (in this paper, M-PSK
and M-QAM modulation are considered), and then reshaped to
parallel data. After the pilot signal is inserted, the computation
of inverse DMWT (IDMWT) for signal is achieved by using an
over-sampled scheme (repeated rows) of preprocessing, then
N-point IDMWT will be applied to the signal. Zeros inserted in
some bins of the IDMWT in order to reduce the adjacent ICI.
After parallel to serial transform, the transmitted signal will
pass through the multipath fading channel with additive white
Gaussian noise (AWGN).

3
5 2

H0 =

2.

3.

data
IDMWT

H2
H0

H3

"

H1

H3
#

"

"

"

H2
#

H3

G1

G2

G3

"

H0
0

G0

G1

G2

G3

"

"

"

G0

G1

G2

G3

"

G0

4
3
5 2
5
,
H
=
1 9
3

20

H1
0
0

G3
G1

0
0
0 0

, H2 = 9 3 , H3 = 1 0
1

20
20 10 2
2

P/S

Receiver

(1)

3
1
3
1
9
9
1

0
20 10 2
20 2
20 10 2

,G1 =
,G2 =
,G3 = 20
G0 =

1
1
3
9
9
3

0
0

10
10 2
10 2 10
10 2

10 2

Transmitter

S/P

H1

20 10 2

Pilot
symbol

Modulation

H 0
0
#

H 2
G 0
0
#

0
G 2

(2)

(3)

Preprocessing the input signal by repeating the input

stream with the same stream multiplied by a constant
, for GHM system, = (1/ 2 ) [8]. So if the input is
vector of N*1 elements, after row preprocessing the
result is vector of 2N*1.
Transformation of input vector can be performed by
apply matrix multiplication to the 2N*2N generated
transformation matrix by the 2N*1 preprocessing input
vector.

III. SIMULATION RESULTS

S/P

DMWT

Channel
Compensation

The computer simulation consequences of bit error rate

(BER) performance of the proposed system for different digital
modulation schemes over the multipath fading channel with
AWGN are presented applying MATLAB (V7.8). The
multipath fading channel used here is Rayleigh fading channel
modeled as Jake's model [9]. The number of subcarriers used in
this simulation are equal to 64 with a bit rate of 5 Mbps.
Fig. 2, presents the performance of the DMWT-OFDM
system with M-PSK and M-QAM mapping schemes over flat
fading channel, where Fig. 2a, with M-PSK (M = 4, 8, 16, 32,
and 64); while Fig. 2b, with M-QAM (M = 4, 8, 16, 32, and
64). From these figures, it can be noticed that when the Eb/No
(the energy per bit to noise power spectral density ratio)
increase, the BER decrease. Also it can be seen that, although
using a higher order of modulation is better for high capacity
transmission, the points on the constellation are very close to
each other which makes the transmission less robust to error
with the same Eb/No. From Fig. 2, it is clear that, for 16-QAM
at a 10-3 BER, the Eb/No is 22.8 dB, whereas, for 16-PSK, it is
30.2 dB. Similarly, for 32-QAM it is 26 dB and for 32-PSK it
is 36.1 dB. Therefore, M-QAM needs a lower Eb/No than MPSK to achieve the same BER.
Fig. 3, shows a comparison between the performance of
DMWT-OFDM and FFT-OFDM under flat Rayleigh fading
channel. The BER performance has been obtained using 16PSK and 16-QAM constellation mapping points. It is found
that the DMWT-OFDM is better than FFT-OFDM. The

data
P/S

Demodulation

Channel
Estimation

Fig. 1. Proposed OFDM-DMWT system (transmitter & receiver).

In the proposed DMWT-OFDM system, it is not necessary

for using CP, Consequently the data rates in proposed system
can be increased comparing with the traditional OFDM system
based on FFT.
At the receiver, the opposite operations are applied. The
output signal is converted to the parallel version and an N-point
DMWT with preprocessing (removing the repeated rows) will
be performed. Then the effective channel is compensated. After
demodulation, the signal is recovered.
To compute the DMWT, the following steps should be
used:
1. Generating an N*N transformation matrix, T, given in
equation (1). The transformation matrix should be
generated using GHM low- and high-pass filters
coefficients given in equations (2) and (3) respectively
[7]. After substituting GHM filter coefficients, an
2N*2N transformation matrix results.

404

after these values the FFT-OFDM became better than the

proposed system, this is due the CP which is already exists in
the FFT-OFDM, that will eliminate the ISI.

DWMT-OFDM gives a gain in Eb/No of about 10.4 dB at 16PSK and 14.5 dB at 16-QAM to achieve a BER performance of
2*10-3 in comparison with the FFT-OFDM.

10

10

-1

10

-2

10

BER

10

10

10

10

-1

-2

BER

10

-3

-4

-5

10
64-PSK
32-PSK
16-PSK
8-PSK
Q-PSK

10

10

10

15

20
Eb/No (dB)

25

30

35

-5

10

10

10

15

20
Eb/No (dB)

25

30

35

40

-1

-1

-2

BER

10
-3

-4

-5

-2

BER

10

10
10

Fig. 3. BER performance of DMWT-OFDM system and FFT-OFDM system

in flat fading channel with 16-PSK and 16-QAM mapping.

10
10

FFT-16PSK
FFT-16QAM
DMWT-16PSK
DMWT-16QAM

-4

40

(a) M-PSK mapping

10

-3

10

64-QAM
32-QAM
16-QAM
8-QAM
4-QAM

10
5

10

15

20

25

30

35

Eb/No (dB)

10

-3

-4

-5

(b) M-QAM mapping

64-PSK
32-PSK
16-PSK
8-PSK
Q-PSK
5

10

15

20
Eb/No (dB)

25

30

35

40

30

35

40

(a) M-PSK mapping

Fig. 2. BER performance of the DMWT-OFDM system in flat fading channel
(a) M-PSK mapping (b) M-QAM mapping.

10

Fig. 4, gives the BER performance of proposed system with

M-PSK and M-QAM in multi-path fading channel, where Fig.
4a, with M-PSK; while Fig. 4b, with M-QAM. 3- paths
Rayleigh fading channel are assumed in this article, where the
parameters of the channel corresponding to multipath are (0dB,
-10dB, -16dB) paths gain and (0, 2-sample, 3-sample) paths
delay. These figures illustrate that M-QAM performs better
than M-PSK. For example, to achieve a BER of l0-3, an Eb/No
of about 22.5 dB is required in case of 4-QAM, while about 24
dB is required in the case of QPSK. Also using a higher order
of modulation is better for high capacity transmission.

10

-1

-2

BER

10

10

10

10

Fig. 5, shows a comparison between the performance of

DMWT-OFDM and FFT-OFDM in multipath fading channel
using 16-PSK and 16-QAM. From this figure, it is clear that
the DMWT-OFDM has better performance than FFT-OFDM
up to Eb/No = 30 dB for 16-QAM, and 30.5 dB for 16-PSK

-3

-4

-5

64-QAM
32-QAM
16-QAM
8-QAM
4-QAM
5

10

15

20
Eb/No (dB)

25

(b) M-QAM mapping

Fig. 4. BER performance of the DMWT-OFDM system in multipath fading
channel (a) M-PSK mapping (b) M-QAM mapping.

405

10

BER

10

10

10

10

[6]

-1

[7]

-2

-3

-4

[8]

FFT-16PSK
FFT-16QAM
DMWT-16PSK
DMWT-16QAM
5

10

15

20
Eb/No (dB)

25

30

35

40

[9]

Fig. 5. BER performance of the DMWT-OFDM system and the traditional

FFT-OFDM system in multipath fading channel with 16-PSK and 16QAM mapping.

IV. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, a DMWT for OFDM system is proposed with
two digital modulation schemes, namely M-PSK and M-QAM
to improve the BER performance over a Rayleigh fading
channel. Simulation results demonstrated that for a high
capacity data rate transmission M-QAM modulation is better
than the M-PSK modulation. Also, it was found that the
DMWT-OFDM is outperforms significantly the FFT-OFDM in
flat fading channel, while, in multipath fading channel the
scenario was changed. Since the CP which is already exists in
the FFT-OFDM will eliminate the ISI, therefore no ISI will
occurred in FFT-OFDM if the CP is greater than the delay
spread of multipath. In the case of DMWT-OFDM there's no
CP therefore ISI will occurred. Therefore the BER
performance of DMWT-OFDM was better than the FFTOFDM until a specific value of Eb/No. Finally, in the proposed
system, there is no need for using cyclic prefix (CP), which
subsequently reduces the system complexity, increases the
transmission rate because it decreases the number of symbol
per frame, and increases spectral efficiency.
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