REPUBLIC OF YEMEN

UNIVERSITY OF ADEN
FACULITY OF ENGINEERING
DEPARTEMENT OF ELECTRONIC AND COMMUNICATION
ENGINEERING

SEMINAR ON:

Prepared by:
NEAME:HELAL SALEM AHMED ALHELALI
REG:106558 CLASS:B5ECE

Supervised by :

Dr. Mussa Ahmed

1-Intodaction 2

2-Block Diagram 3

3-Definition 4

4-OFDM 5

4.1-Orthogonality 6

4.2-OFDM system 6

4.2.1-FFT and IFFT 6

4.2.2-Cyclic Prefix 7

4.2.3-Ofdm Modulation 7

4.2.4-Ofdm Demodulation 7

5-examples 8

6-Matlab Simulation 10

6.1-OFDM Transmitter part 10

6.2-OFDM receiver part 14

7-Conclusion 17

8-Refrenence 18

1
1. Introduction

Due to the spectacular growth of the wireless services and demands during the last years,
the need of a modulation technique that could transmit high data rates at high bandwidth
efficiency strongly imposed.

The problem of the intersymbol interference (ISI) introduced by the frequency selectivity of
the channel became even more imperative once the desired transmission rates dramatically
grew up.

Using adaptive equalization techniques at the receiver in order to combat the ISI effects could be
the solution, but there are practical difficulties in operating this equalization in real-time conditions
at several Mb/s with compact, low-cost hardware.

OFDM is a promising candidate that eliminates the need of very complex equalization.

In a conventional serial data system, the symbols are transmitted sequentially, one by one, with
the frequency spectrum of each data symbol allowed to occupy the entire available
bandwidth. A high rate data transmission supposes a very short symbol duration, conducing at a
large spectrum of the modulation symbol.

There are good chances that the frequency selective channel response affects in a very
distinctive manner the different spectral components of the data symbol, hence introducing the ISI
[1].

The same phenomenon, regarded in the time domain consists in smearing and spreading of
information symbols such, the energy from one symbol interfering with the energy of the next
ones, in such a way that the received signal has a high

probability of being incorrectly interpreted.

Intuitively, one can assume that the frequency selectivity of the channel can be mitigated if, instead
of transmitting a single high rate data stream, we transmit the data simultaneously, on several
narrow-band subchannels (with a different carrier corresponding to each subchannel), on
which the frequency response of the channel looks flat (see fig. 1).

Hence, for a given overall data rate, increasing the number of carriers reduces the data rate
that each individualcarrier must convey, therefore lengthening the symbol duration on each
subcarrier. Slow data rate (and long symbol Subchannel index frequency The frequency-
selective channel response Fig. 1: The frequency-selectivechannel response and the relatively flat
response on each subchannel duration) on each subchannel merely means that the effects of ISI are
severely reduced.

This is in fact the basic idea that lies behind OFDM. Transmitting the data among a large number
of closely spaced subcarriers accounts for the frequency division multiplexing part of the name.
Unlike the classical frequency division multiplexing technique, OFDM will provide much higher

2
bandwidth efficiency. This is due to the fact that in OFDM the spectra of individual subcarriers are
allowed to overlap. In fact, the carriers are carefully chosen to be orthogonal one another.

As it is well known, the orthogonal signals do not interfere, and they can be separated at the
receiver by correlation techniques. The orthogonality of thesubcarriers accounts for the first part of
the OFDM name[1].

2- Block Diagram of an OFDM System.

Figure(1( Block Diagram of an OFDM System[2].

3-defination:

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a technique, method or scheme for

digital multi-carrier modulation using many closely spaced subcarriers - a previously modulated
signal modulated into another signal of higher frequency and bandwidth. Each of these subcarriers
contains numbers of parallel data streams or channels and is modulated conventionally at a low
symbol rate; these are groups of bits of data related to (but not the same as) gross bitrate, which is
expressed in bits/second.

3
This term is also known as coded OFDM (COFDM) and discrete multi-tone modulation (DMT),
used for both wireless and physical communication mediums[3]

4-Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM)

4.1-Orthogonality

The orthogonality of different OFDM subcarriers can also be demonstrated in another way.
According to (1), each OFDM symbol contains subcarriers that are nonzero over a T -seconds
interval. Hence, the spectrum of a single symbol is a convolution of group of Dirac pulses located
at the subcarrier frequencies with the spectrum of a square pulse that is one for a T-second period
and zero otherwise. The amplitude spectrum of the square pulse is equal to sin c(fT ) , which has
zeros for all frequencies f that are an integer multiple of 1/T . This effect is shown in figure which
shows the overlapping sinc spectra of individual subcarriers. At the maximum of each subcarrier
spectrum, all other subcarrier spectra are zero. Because an OFDM receiver calculates the spectrum
values at those points that correspond to the maxima of individual subcarrier, it can demodulate
each subcarrier free from any interference from the other subcarriers. Basically, Figure (2) shows
that the OFDM spectrum fulfills Nyquists criterion for an inter symbol interference free pulse
shape. Notice that the pulse shape is present in frequency domain and note in the time domain, for
which the Nyquist criterion usually is applied. Therefore, instead of intersymbol interference (ISI),
it is intercarrier interference (ICI) that avoided by having the maximum of one subcarrier spectrum
correspond to zero crossing of all the others[4].

1 0 + 1 0 + 1 =
2 2 = 2() = { (1)
0 0 0

Figure(2)

4
4.2-OFDM system:

Figure (3) OFDM system

The OFDM system studied in this paper has the block structure as shown in Figure )3(. The
system maps the input bits into complex-valued symbols X(n) in the modulation block, which
determines the constellation scheme of each subcarrier. The number of bits assigned to each
subcarrier is based on the signal to noise ratio of each subcarrier on the frequency range. The
adaptive bit loading algorithm will be detailed below. The IFFT block modulates X(n) onto N
orthogonal subcarriers. A cyclic prefix is then added to the multiplexed output of IFFT. The
obtained signal is then converted to a time continuous analog signal before it is transmitted through
the channel. At the receiver side, an inverse operation is carried out and the information data is
detected[5].

4.2.1-FFT and IFFT

The key components of an OFDM system are the inverse FFT at the transmitter and FFT at
the receiver. These operations performing linear mappings between N complex data symbols and
N complex OFDM symbols, result in robustness against fading multipath channel. The reason is to
transform the high data rate stream into N low data rate streams, each experiencing a flat fading
during the transmission. Suppose the data set to be transmitted is

X(1), X(2), ..., X(N)

5
where N is the total number of sub-carriers. The discrete-time representation of the signal after
IFFT is:

1
() = 1
=0 (). 2 , = 0 1 (2)

At the receiver side, the data is recovered by performing FFT on the received signal,

1 2
() = 1
=0 (). , = 0 1 (3)

An N-point FFT only requires N log(N) multiplications, which is much more computationally
ecient than an equivalent system with equalizer in time domain[5].

4.2.2-Cyclic Prefix:

In an OFDM system, the channel has a finite impulse response. We note tmax the maximum
delay of all reflected paths of the OFDM transmitted signal, see Figure 4.

Figure 4: Channel impulse response.

Cyclic prefix is a crucial feature of OFDM to combat the eect of multipath. Inter symbol
interference (ISI) and inter channel interference (ICI) are avoided by introducing a guard interval
at the front, which, specifically, is chosen to be a replica of the back of OFDM time domain
waveform.

The idea behind this is to convert the linear convolution (between signal and channel re-
sponse) to a circular convolution. In this way, the FFT of circulary convolved signals is equivalent
to a multiplication in the frequency domain. However, in order to preserve the orthogonality

6
property, tmax should not exceed the duration of the time guard interval. As shown below, once the
above condition is satisfied, there is no ISI since the previous symbol will only have eect[5].

4.2.3-OFDM MODULATION

In OFDM transmitter N complex-value source symbols k=0,1,...N-1, which can come from

any constellation, such as QPSK or QAM, are modulated onto N orthogonal subcarriers - inverse

Fourier-Transform complex exponentials evaluated at subcarrier frequencies :

1
x (t ) = ej2f (1)
=0

In a digital transmitter t=nT s where T s is the sampling period. Subcarriers frequencies

are uniformly distributed:

= = 0,1, . . . 1 (2)
Frequency spacing is equal to 1 in order to preserve orthogonality between subcarriers.

The final form of OFDM transmission takes a form of inverse-Fast-Fourier Transform:

1 j2nk
= ( ) = e = 0,1, . . . 1 (3)
=0

N-sample long x sequence is called OFDM symbol and its duration is equal to N* .[6]

4.2.4-OFDM DEMODULATION

ADC at the receiver receives an analog signal which is a result of convolution of the

transmitted OFDM symbol x(t) with the channel impulse response plus noise:

() = ( ) (, ) + () (1)

OFDM demodulation takes a form of Fast-Fourier Transform of the sampled received signal
r(t) (after removal of N g samples of the guard interval):
1 2nk
= e = 0,1, . . . 1 (2)
=0

Since inter-carrier interference (ICI) is avoided by maintaining orthogonality between subcarriers

the channels (H k s) at subcarriers frequencies can be treated independently and the demodulated

7
OFDM symbol in a frequency domain can be written as:

= + (3)

After channel estimation which yields complex-valued channel attenuation factors H k at

each subcarriers frequency the decoded k-th transmitted data symbol can be obtained through

the following transformation[6]:

= / ( ) (4)

5-examples
1. GNU Radio OFDM Example(7)(9).
I. Implementation
There is an OFDM example in the GNU Radio package. It implements the basic processing
blocks of OFDM, and uses USRP to transmit and receive OFDM signals. The flow charts of
transmitter and receiver are shown in Figure 6.

(a) Transmitter

(b) Receiver

Figure 6 GNU Radio OFDM Example.

8
II. Experiment Setup
a) Hardware setting:
Transmitter is one desktop computer connected with one USRP, which is equipped with
RFX2400 daughterboard and VERT2450 antenna. Receiver has the same setting.
Transmitter and Receiver are placed 5 feet apart from each other.

b) The source code is located in directory: ~/gnuradio/gnuradio-examples/python/ofdm/,

benchmark_ofdm_tx.py is for Transmitter and benchmark_ofdm_rx.py is for Receiver.
Their usage can be accessed by using -h command line option.

III. Experiment Result

c) OFDM spectrum

In this experiment, the spectrum analyzer is used to display the signal spectrum:
connect one VERT2450 antenna to the input of the spectrum analyzer, set the center
frequency to 2.422GHz and set the display span to 500KHz.

On Transmitter, enter the directory ~/gnuradio/gnuradio-examples/python/ofdm/ and

enter the following command:
./benchmark_ofdm_tx.py -f 2422M --tx-amplitude=26214 -v

where tx-amplitude has a maximum value of 32768, and setting it to 26214 is equal
to using 80% of the maximum transmitting power. Other parameters are the default
values: modulation scheme is BPSK and the number of FFT bins is 512.

The OFDM spectrum observed on the spectrum analyzer is shown in Figure 3,

which demonstrates the shape of the theoretical OFDM spectrum, as shown in
Figure 4.
d) Data Transmission and Reception

On Receiver, enter the directory ~/gnuradio/gnuradio-examples/python/ofdm/ and

enter the following command:

./benchmark_ofdm_rx.py -f 2422M -v

Other parameters are the default values: modulation scheme is BPSK and the
number of FFT bins is 512.[7].

9
 Figure7: Signal Spectrum of GNU Radio OFDM Example

Figure 8:Theoretical OFDM Spectrum .

6-Matlab Simulation
6.1-OFDM Transmitter part
clc;
clear all;
close all;
%..............................................................
% Initiation
%..............................................................
no_of_data_bits = 64%Number of bits per channel extended to 128
M =4 %Number of subcarrier channel
n=256;%Total number of bits to be transmitted at the transmitter
block_size = 16; %Size of each OFDM block to add cyclic prefix
cp_len = floor(0.1 * block_size); %Length of the cyclic prefix
%............................................................
% Transmitter
%.........................................................
%.........................................................
% Source generation and modulation
%........................................................
% Generate random data source to be transmitted of length 64
data = randsrc(1, no_of_data_bits, 0:M-1);
figure(1),stem(data); grid on; xlabel('Data Points'); ylabel('Amplitude')

10
title('Original Data ')
% Perform QPSK modulation on the input source data
qpsk_modulated_data = pskmod(data, M);
figure(2),stem(qpsk_modulated_data);title('QPSK Modulation ')
%............................................................
%.............................................................
% Converting the series data stream into four parallel data stream to form
% four sub carriers
S2P = reshape(qpsk_modulated_data, no_of_data_bits/M,M)
Sub_carrier1 = S2P(:,1)
Sub_carrier2 = S2P(:,2)
Sub_carrier3 = S2P(:,3)
Sub_carrier4 = S2P(:,4)
figure(3), subplot(4,1,1),stem(Sub_carrier1),title('Subcarrier1'),grid on;
subplot(4,1,2),stem(Sub_carrier2),title('Subcarrier2'),grid on;
subplot(4,1,3),stem(Sub_carrier3),title('Subcarrier3'),grid on;
subplot(4,1,4),stem(Sub_carrier4),title('Subcarrier4'),grid on;
%..................................................................
%..................................................................
% IFFT OF FOUR SUB_CARRIERS
%.................................................................
%..............................................................
number_of_subcarriers=4;
cp_start=block_size-cp_len;
ifft_Subcarrier1 = ifft(Sub_carrier1)
ifft_Subcarrier2 = ifft(Sub_carrier2)
ifft_Subcarrier3 = ifft(Sub_carrier3)
ifft_Subcarrier4 = ifft(Sub_carrier4)
figure(4), subplot(4,1,1),plot(real(ifft_Subcarrier1),'r'),
title('IFFT on all the sub-carriers')
subplot(4,1,2),plot(real(ifft_Subcarrier2),'c')
subplot(4,1,3),plot(real(ifft_Subcarrier3),'b')
subplot(4,1,4),plot(real(ifft_Subcarrier4),'g')
%...........................................................
%...........................................................
% ADD-CYCLIC PREFIX %..........................................................
%............................................................
for i=1:number_of_subcarriers,
ifft_Subcarrier(:,i) = ifft((S2P(:,i)),16)% 16 is the ifft point
for j=1:cp_len,
cyclic_prefix(j,i) = ifft_Subcarrier(j+cp_start,i)
end
Append_prefix(:,i) = vertcat( cyclic_prefix(:,i), ifft_Subcarrier(:,i))
% Appends prefix to each subcarriers
end
A1=Append_prefix(:,1);
A2=Append_prefix(:,2);
A3=Append_prefix(:,3);
A4=Append_prefix(:,4);
figure(5), subplot(4,1,1),plot(real(A1),'r'),title('Cyclic prefix added to all the sub-carriers')
subplot(4,1,2),plot(real(A2),'c')
subplot(4,1,3),plot(real(A3),'b')
subplot(4,1,4),plot(real(A4),'g')
figure(11),plot((real(A1)),'r'),title('Orthogonality'),hold on ,plot((real(A2)),'c'),hold on ,
plot((real(A3)),'b'),hold on ,plot((real(A4)),'g'),hold on ,grid on
%Convert to serial stream for transmission
[rows_Append_prefix cols_Append_prefix]=size(Append_prefix)
len_ofdm_data = rows_Append_prefix*cols_Append_prefix
% OFDM signal to be transmitted
ofdm_signal = reshape(Append_prefix, 1, len_ofdm_data);
figure(6),plot(real(ofdm_signal)); xlabel('Time'); ylabel('Amplitude');
title('OFDM Signal');grid on;
%...............................................................[8].

11
(10)

(11)

(12)

12
 (12)

(13)

Figure 10,11,12,13,14: OFDM in Transmitter

13
6.2-OFDM receiver part
%..........................................................
recvd_signal_paralleled = reshape(recvd_signal,rows_Append_prefix,
cols_Append_prefix);
%........................................................
%........................................................
% Remove cyclic Prefix
%.......................................................
%......................................................
recvd_signal_paralleled(1:cp_len,:)=[];
R1=recvd_signal_paralleled(:,1);
R2=recvd_signal_paralleled(:,2);
R3=recvd_signal_paralleled(:,3);
R4=recvd_signal_paralleled(:,4);
figure(8),plot((imag(R1)),'r'),subplot(4,1,1),plot(real(R1),'r'),
title('Cyclic prefix removed from the four sub-carriers')
subplot(4,1,2),plot(real(R2),'c')
subplot(4,1,3),plot(real(R3),'b')
subplot(4,1,4),plot(real(R4),'g')
%...................................................
%...................................................
% FFT Of recievied signal
for i=1:number_of_subcarriers,
% FFT
fft_data(:,i) = fft(recvd_signal_paralleled(:,i),16);
end
F1=fft_data(:,1);
F2=fft_data(:,2);
F3=fft_data(:,3);
F4=fft_data(:,4);
figure(9), subplot(4,1,1),plot(real(F1),'r'),title('FFT of all the four sub-carriers')
subplot(4,1,2),plot(real(F2),'c')
subplot(4,1,3),plot(real(F3),'b')
subplot(4,1,4),plot(real(F4),'g')
%................................
%..............................
% Signal Reconstructed
%..................................
%..................................
% Conversion to serial and demodulationa
recvd_serial_data = reshape(fft_data, 1,(16*4));
qpsk_demodulated_data = pskdemod(recvd_serial_data,4);
figure(10)
stem(data)
hold on
stem(qpsk_demodulated_data,'rx');
grid on;xlabel('Data Points');ylabel('Amplitude');
title('Recieved Signal with error') [8].

14
 Figure(15)

Figure(16)OFDM receiver.

15
Figure(17) OFDM receiver.

16
7-Conclusion
There is some debate as to whether multicarrier or single carrier modulation
is better for ISI channels with delay spreads on the order of the symbol time.
It is claimed in that for some mobile radio applications , single carrier with
equalization has roughly the same performance as multicarrier modulation
with channel coding, frequency-domain interleaving, and weighted
maximum-likelihood decoding. Adaptive loading was not taken into account
, which has the potential to significantly improve multicarrier . But there are
other problems with multicarrier modulation that impair its performance,
most significantly frequency offset and timing jitter, which degrade the
orthogonality of the subchannels. In addition, the peak-to-average power
ratio of multi carrier is significantly higher than that of single carrier
systems, which is a serious problem when nonlinear amplifiers are used .
Tradeoffs between multicarrier and single carrier block transmission
systems with respect to these impairments are discussed. Despite these
challenges, multicarrier techniques are common in high data rate wireless
systems with moderate to large delay spread, as they have significant
advantages over time-domain equalization. In particular, the number of taps

required for an equalizer with good performance in a high data rate system is
typically large . thus, these equalizers are highly complex. Weights for a large
number of equalizer taps in a rapidly varying channel. For these reasons, most
emerging high rate wireless systems use either multicarrier modulation or spread
spectrum to eliminate ISI[9].

17
8-Refrenence:
1) Ofdm by Marius Oltean
Universitatea PolitehnicaTimioara.

2) Ofdm simulation in matlab a Senior Project by Paul Guanming

Lin.

3) Ofdm
https://www.techopedia.com/definition/5078/orthogonal-
frequency-division-multiplexing-ofdm .

4) Wireless communication course (fall 2006) OFDM Basics by: Yasser

Ahmed Abbady.

5) OFDM Project by Jia Liu, Erik Bergenudd, Vinod Patmanathan,

Romain Masson May 2005.
6) OFDM TRANSCEIVER DESIGN by Michal Litwin Project
Advisor: Bruce R. Land Degree Date: August 2010.

7) GNURadioProjects,https://www.cgran.org/wiki/Projects .

8) Matlab code.
http://www.rfwireless-world.com/source-code/MATLAB/OFDM-
matlab-code.html
9) Wikipedia for ofdm:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonal_frequency-
division_multiplexing.

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