Equalized GMSK, Equalized QPSK and OFDM, a Comparative Study for High-speed Wireless Indoor Data Communications

Hanli Zou, Hea Joung Kim, Sungsoo Kim, Babak Daneshrad, Rick Wesel, William Magione-Smith Department of Electrical Engineering University of California, Los Angeles e-mail: babak@ee.ucla.edu
Abstract The proper choice of modulation and detection schemes to enable high-speed wireless indoor data communications has been the subject of extensive study. Of particular interest to ASIC designers is the complexity, cost and power dissipation of the analog and digital processing elements associated with such systems. This paper presents a side-by-side comparison of the three most popular system architectures for high-speed wireless data communications, namely equalized QPSK, equalized GMSK and OFDM. Their performance and minimum configuration at data rates up to 30 Mbps is measured and analyzed under a set of simulated indoor wireless channels with ensemble-average rms delay spread rms of 35ns. Achievable channel capacity is proposed as a metric as well as outage and spectral efficiency. Finally, a single figure of merit is used to compare the three systems. comparison that combines classical measures such as outage and spectral efficiency with the implementation aspect of the analog and digital processing elements would go a long way towards identifying the best system for implementation. This is the goal of this paper. In this paper, we investigated three systems capable of transmitting raw data at 30 Mbps, namely QPSK with T/2-spaced decision feedback equalization (DFE), precoded GMSK with T-spaced DFE, and OFDM. The candidate systems are simulated over an ensemble of 100 channels that model the environment in a typical office building at 5.2 GHz. Our approach is to manipulate the following set of parameters: transmit power number of equalizer taps for the QPSK and GMSK systems number of sub-channels and QAM constellations on each sub-channel of the OFDM system in order to achieve the same outage performance (5% at an uncoded BER < 10-4), with a coverage radius of 20 m for all the three systems operating over the same set of 100 channels. Having accomplished this, a comparison of the required power consumption, taking into account both the power amplifier and processing requirements of each system, is presented. To enable a fair comparison, achievable channel capacity is proposed as the metric in addition to traditional measures such as slicer SNR. The paper is organized as follows: Section II describes the simulation environment and setup; Section III presents the simulated results and proposes achievable channel capacity as the metric for comparison; Section IV concludes the paper.

I.

INTRODUCTION

Recently there has been considerable interest in research and development of high-speed indoor wireless communication systems. Such systems would provide users access to a wide range of multimedia services, with easy setup and local mobility in a typical office environment. One particular application is high-speed wireless local area networks (WLANs). To compete with existing wired LANs these systems must be able to support data rates in excess of 10 Mbps. It is quite a challenging design problem to achieve such high data rates (10-30 Mbps) over the hostile multipath indoor channel with coverage radii of up to 30 meters using a low power portable unit. In choosing a proper air interface for such a system, several major considerations should be addressed, namely low power consumption and complexity, high spectral efficiency, robustness, flexible data rates and high throughput. To date, three major system architectures have been proposed and studied. The HIPERLAN standard in Europe uses GMSK with equalization to deliver approximately 23.5 Mbps over the air data rate [1]. On the other hand, a recent submission to the IEEE 802.11 committee focuses on coded orthogonal frequency multiplexing (COFDM) at 20 Mbps [2]. Additionally, the equalized QPSK architecture has recently been field tested at 30 Mbps [3]. A side-by-side

II.

SIMULATION SETUP

All the simulations are performed using the same set of randomly generated channels with an ensemble averaged rms delay spread rms=35 ns. The channel impulse responses are given by

h(t ) = m e jm (t m )
m

(1)

and follow an exponential power-delay-profile [4]. In Equation (1) the random variables m and m follow the Rayleigh distribution and the uniform distribution respectively. The model also includes lognormal shadow fading with a standard deviation of 4 dB as well as a cubic path loss exponent.
QPSK Source Fbaud Sqrt-Raised Cosine D/A Fs=2Fbaud Transmitter Anti-alias LPF VGA AGC A/D Fs=2Fbaud Sqrt-Raised FFF Cosine e(n) Recei ver e(n) e(n) + QPSK Slicer M U X Symbol Detection Anti-alias LPF Channel Training Seq.

Training Ctrl FBF

Figure 1. Block diagram of QPSK with T/2-spaced DFE

The QPSK with T/2-spaced DFE structure is shown in Figure 1. The transmitter consists of a 15 Mbaud QPSK source followed by a pair of square-root raised cosine filters having a roll-off factor of 0.3. The same filters are also used in the receiver after the variable gain amplifier and A/Ds. The D/A and A/D converters operate at twice the baud rate. The T/2-spaced DFE in the receiver uses the least mean square (LMS) algorithm for coefficient updates. Not shown in detail, the channel module contains the channel model given in (1) as well as additive white Gaussian noise (AGWN) with a PSD of 174 dBm/Hz. All analog channel and front-end transceiver components are modeled to the first order. The receiver front-end is modeled as having a noise figure of 7 dB.
Data Fbaud Transmitter Precoder GMSK modulator D/A Fs=2Fbaud Anti-alias LPF Channel

slicers (one for in-phase and the other for quadrature) and the slicer output directly corresponds to the transmitted binary data. The receiver uses the LMS algorithm to update the tap coefficients. The choice of symbol spaced equalization for GMSK is based on several considerations. Though fractionally spaced equalizers generally are less sensitive to sampling phase offset as compared to symbol spaced equalizers, this merit is less evident in GMSK than in QPSK. This can be explained by the fact that the power spectrum of GMSK falls off faster than that of QPSK. The power spectral density of GMSK is almost 20 dB lower than that of QPSK at the same normalized frequency of (f-fc)/Ts=1 [5]. Therefore when a GMSK waveform is sampled at the symbol rate, the aliasing image is much smaller than that in QPSK. Our simulation also verified this. Moreover, to cover the same channel span, a fractional spaced equalizer needs more taps along with faster A/Ds, and faster logic (operate at 60 MHz as opposed to 30 MHz). The substantial reduction of power consumption and circuit complexity, in addition to the intangible degradation of performance compared to a T/2-spaced DFE justifies our choice.
Random Bits QAM Mapper S/P IDFT Fbaud Transmitter Cyclic Prefix + Gaurd Interval P/S D/A Fs=16Fbaud Anti-alias LPF Channel

fs=30 Mbps

Anti-alias LPF

VGA AGC

A/D Fs=2Fbaud

S/P Buffer

FFF

P/S

QAM Slicer

Recei ver

Figure 4. Block diagram of OFDM system

BPSK Slicer Anti-alias LPF VGA AGC A/D Fs=2Fbaud Receive FFF Filter e(n) BPSK Slicer

M U X M U X

M U X

e(n)

Training Ctrl FBF Receiver e(n) Training Seq.

Figure 2. Block diagram of GMSK with T-spaced DFE

Random Bits

Fbaud=30 Mbps

XOR 1 bit delay

XNOR

Precoded data

2 bit interval

Figure 3. Pre-coder for GMSK

The block diagram for the simulated GMSK system is illustrated in Figure 2. The transmitter consists of a precoder and a GMSK modulator (BT=0.5) followed by D/A converters. The structure of the pre-coder is shown in Figure 3. It enables GMSK to be received as QPSK and hence the DFE can be utilized. Due to the pre-coding at the transmitter, the receiver now uses two sets of BPSK

Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a form of multi-carrier modulation [6]. The total bandwidth is divided into many narrowband subchannels, which are transmitted and received in parallel. Since each sub-channel is now only a small fraction of the original bandwidth, equalization can be obviated. The price paid for this reduction of baseband processing is the requirement of a highly linear transmit amplifier due to the large peak-to-average power (PAP) ratio associated with the OFDM waveform. Figure 4 shows the structure of the simulated OFDM system. A single QAM source generator is followed by a serial-to-parallel conversion, then an IDFT is performed on the block of data to accomplish the modulation. Cyclic prefix and guard interval is added to combat the delay spread of the channel. The processed block is converted back into serial data and transmitted over the channel. On the receive side, the serial-to-parallel converter buffers the incoming data and strips away the cyclic prefix. A DFT is performed to demodulate the data. A single complex adaptive tap is needed for each sub-channel to compensate for attenuation and phase shift in that particular sub-channel. This tap is continuously updated using the LMS algorithm. The equalized data is passed

through a parallel-to-serial converter then a QAM slicer which recovers the transmitted data.

III.

SIMULATION RESUTLS

All three systems were simulated over the same set of 100 channels with an ensemble averaged rms delay spread of 35 ns. The channels also incorporate the path loss of up to 20 m in a typical indoor environment at 5.2 GHz as well as shadow fading (=4 dB) and AWGN with PSD of 174 dBm/Hz. The first part of this section presents the results in terms of the slicer SNR and outage. The system configurations to achieve these results are also compared. In the second part, achievable channel capacity is proposed as the measure to allow comparison on a more equal footing. The last part of the section compares the hardware complexity and estimates the power consumption for each system.

5.0*10-4. However, this is not a fair comparison if the frequency and time diversity inherent in OFDM is not explored. A simple code across the sub-channels will provide a substantial coding gain for OFDM. Thus, to include the effect of coding, channel capacity is proposed as the figure of merit and discussed in the next subsection.
1

0.9

0.8

Percentage < Abscissa

0.7

0.6

0.5

0.4

0.3

0.2

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# FFF: 4 # FFF: 6 # FFF: 12

0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40

3.1 Outage Performance Based on SNR

In order to guarantee 5% outage with an uncoded BER of 10-4, we varied the transmit power level and the equalizer span. Our studies indicated that in order for the equalized QPSK system to meet the specified performance, we require a minimum transmit power of 17.5 dBm, 6 feedforward filter (FFF) taps plus 4 feed-back filter (FBF) taps (referred to as DFE(6,4)). Figure 5 shows the CDF of the system with 17.5 dBm transmit power, utilizing 4 FBF taps in conjunction with 4, 6 and 12 FFF taps. The plot indicates that using more than 6 FFF taps does not improve the outage performance as the channels with slicer SNR<11.8 dB (which corresponds to uncoded BER of 10-4) are in deep fade and the performance is dominated by AWGN. We also simulated the GMSK systems with different DFE sizes and various transmit powers to achieve the same performance. The equalized GMSK system requires 13 dBm transmit power and DFE(8,6) at the receiver. In Figure 6, the CDFs with different FFF taps and 6 FBF taps are shown. Although the GMSK system with 12 FFF taps gives higher slicer SNRs for most of the channels, we noticed that increasing the FFF spans does not improve overall outage performance. Thus a configuration of 8 FFF taps and 6 FBF taps is adequate for GMSK. In our simulations, we also noticed that after the number of taps in the FBF is increased to a certain value (4 in QPSK and 6 in GMSK), the performance of the two systems does not improve by further increasing the size of the feedback section. Various QAM constellations and number of sub-channels were studied in the OFDM system. We generated a CDF plot of the average slicer SNR for the uncoded OFDM system in Figure 7. The result was obtained using QPSK on 16 sub-channels with 4 samples for the cyclic prefix, 1 sample of guard interval and a transmit power of 17 dBm. The average BER at 5% outage using this approach is

Slicer Steady State SNR (dB)

Figure 5. CDF of Slicer SNR for QPSK with different FFF taps
1

0.9

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Percentage < Abscissa

0.7

0.6

0.5

0.4

0.3

0.2

0.1

# FFF: 4 # FFF: 8 # FFF: 12

0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35

Slicer Steady State SNR (dB)

Figure 6. CDF of Slicer SNR for GMSK with different FFF taps
1

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Percentage < Abscissa

0.7

0.6

0.5

0.4

0.3

0.2

0.1

10

15

20

25

30

35

Average Slicer SNR (dB)

Figure 7. CDF of average slicer SNR for OFDM

3.2 Comparison Based on Channel Capacity

Channel capacity is defined as the maximum information rate that can be reliably transmitted over a channel. It represents the upper bound of reliable data communications regardless of the complexity and delay of the coding/decoding algorithm. As the search for the best codes for COFDM is still under investigation, we feel

that it is more appropriate to compare the channel capacities of the three systems. This provides us with an ultimate metric as to how well these three systems will perform in a given channel. For our purpose, we calculated the capacity of the systems using the equations presented in [8] for the case of QAM transmission over an AWGN channel. This is possible since the multipath channels are effectively transformed into AWGN channels due to the presence of the DFE or multi-carrier modulation [10]. Figure 8 shows the CDFs of achievable channel capacities for the three systems under study.
1

the two systems until they achieve a performance comparable to that of OFDM. The capacity CDFs for such configurations are plotted in Figure 9. In the next subsection, we compare the three systems using a single figure-of-merit taking into account both spectral efficiency and power consumption.

3.3 Hardware Complexity

In this section, a comparison of the complexity of the core signal processing elements is presented. The power consumption of both the RF and the baseband signal processing sections are estimated based on data compiled from literature [9][11]. All power consumption is scaled to a 0.6 m CMOS technology with a 3.3 V supply [12] to allow a fair comparison. The three systems with the configuration as stated in Figure 9 are chosen as the basis for comparison. Table 1 summaries the results. Included in the table is a figure of merit defined as m*bps/Hz/Watt, which measures how many bits per unit bandwidth can be transmitted over the same range using unit power.
Table 1. Comparison of QPSK, GMSK and OFDM QPSK with T/2 DFE 3.6 dB 11.5 dBm (14 mW) 32 tap RC FIR @ 15 MHz 58 mW 32 tap RC FIR @ 15 MHz 58 mW T/2 DFE (6,4) @ 15 MHz 87 mW 203 mW GMSK with DFE 0.4 dB 10 dBm (10 mW) 32 tap Gaussian FIR @ 30 MHz 116 mW 32 tap Gaussian FIR @ 30 MHz 116 mW DFE (6,4) @ 30 MHz 109 mW 341 mW OFDM 11.4 dB 17 dBm (50 mW) 16 IFFT @ 20 MHz 55 mW 16 FFT @ 20 MHz 55 mW 16 FFF @ 1MHz 6mW 116 mW

0.95

Availability
0.9

OFDM QPSK GMSK

0.85 1.4 1.6 1.8 2 2.2 2.4 2.6 2.8 3

Capacity (*10 Mbps)

Figure 8. CDFs of channel capacity for QPSK with DFE(6,4), 17.5 dBm Tx power; GMSK with DFE(8,6), 13 dBm Tx power; OFDM with QPSK on 16 sub-channels and Tx power of 17 dBm.

If 95% availability (or 5% outage) is required for all three systems, then both QPSK and GMSK can support a capacity of close to 30 Mbps while OFDM can support only 25 Mbps. From the plot alone, one might conclude that OFMD performs poorer than the other two systems. This can be partially explained by the fact that if there is a deep notch in the channel, then the poor performance on that sub-channel will begin to dominate. Intuitively, the performance of OFDM can be improved significantly if higher QAM constellations are used for the individual subcarriers.
1

PAP ratio Avg. Tx Power Tx signal processing Rx signal processing

0.95

Availability

Total Baseband power -20 dB Bandwidth Capacity @ 5% outage m*bps/Hz/W with avg. RF power m*bps/Hz/W with peak RF power

19.5 MHz 28.2 Mbps 133.3

39 MHz 29 Mbps 42.4

20 MHz 25 Mbps 150

124.4

42.2

30.9

0.9

OFDM QPSK GMSK

0.85 1.4 1.6 1.8 2 2.2 2.4 2.6 2.8 3

Capacity (*10 Mbps)

Figure 9. CDFs of channel capacity for QPSK with DFE(6,4), 11.5 dBm Tx power; GMSK with DFE(6,4), 10 dBm Tx power; OFDM with QPSK on 16 sub-channels and Tx power of 17 dBm.

In Figure 8, the QPSK and the GMSK system achieved capacities close to the theoretical limit at 5% outage. We can reduce the transmit power and/or equalizer span of

Several points should be noted regarding the interpretation of these results. First, we ignore frequency and timing synchronization circuitry and AGC circuits, which are generally low in complexity and have common structures for all three systems. Second, there are two sets of figure-of-merit given in the table. One is based on the average transmitted RF power and the other on the peak RF power taking into account the PAP ratio. We should notice that if no PAP ratio reduction technique is utilized in OFDM, the power amplifier for the OFDM requires a much higher linear range than that of QPSK and GMSK. This implies a much larger biasing power dissipation and effectively makes OFDM the least favorable system.

However various PAP ratio reduction methods have been studied and it has been shown that PAP ratio for OFDM can be reduced by 5-6 dB with moderate hardware complexity and redundancy [7]. Thirdly, the FEC decoder is not included in this study, which in reality can consume a significant portion of the receiver power budget and chip area. Finally, we want to emphasize again that channel capacity is used as the measure as opposed to more frequently used metric such as data throughput. This gives us a picture of how well these systems could ultimately perform. Though OFDM out performs the other two systems using our measure with average transmitted RF power, it should be emphasized that OFDM imposes stricter constraints on the analog blocks due to its large PAP and its sensitivity to carrier frequency offset and phase noise. Thus for those designers thinking of system-on-a-chip implementation of OFDM, quite a few challenging problems still need to be solved. Though GMSK lags behind in our comparison, the constant envelope nature of GMSK is still attractive to system designers as a high efficiency nonlinear power amplifier can be used.

IEEE ICUPC '97, San Diego, USA, 12-16 Oct. 1997, vol.1. 2, pp. 104-108. [4] Cox, T.F., Generation of Channel Impulse Responses from the HIPERLAN Channel Model, Feb. 18, 1994 HIPERLAN Contribution. [5] Yacoub, M., Foundations of Mobile Radio Engineering, CRC Press, Boca Raton, Florida, 1993. [6] Weinstein, S.B., Ebert, P.M., Data Transmission by Frequency-Division Multiplexing Using Discrete Fourier Transform, IEEE Trans. Commun. Tech., vol. COM-19, no. 5, pp. 629-634, Oct. 1971. [7] Muller, S.H., Huber, J.B., A Comparison of Peak Power Reduction Schemes for OFDM, GLOBECOM97, Phoenix, AZ, USA, Nov. 3-8, 1997, vol.1. 3, pp.1-5. [8] Ungerboeck, G., Channel Coding with Multilevel/Phase Signals, IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, vol. 28(1), pp. 55-67, Jan. 1982. [9] Joshi, R., Samueli, H., A 100 MHz 5Mbaud QAM Decision-Feedback Equalizer for Digital Television Applications, Proc. of IEEE ISSCC94, San Francisco, CA, USA, Feb. 16-18, 1994, pp. 68-69. [10] Proakis, J.G., Digital Communications, McGrawHill, New York, 1995. [11] Bickerstaff, M., et al, A Low Power 50 MHz FFT Processor with Cyclic Extension and Shaping Filter, Proc. of the Asian and South Pacific Design Automation Conference 1998, Yokohama, Japan, Feb. 1998, pp.335336. [12] Rabaey, J., Digital Integrated Circuits-A Design Perspective, Prentice-Hall Inc., Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, 1996.

IV.

CONCLUSION

A comparative study of three systems suitable for highspeed indoor wireless data communications, namely equalized QPSK, equalized GMSK and OFDM, is presented. The performance of the three systems was simulated using the same set of channels. QPSK with T/2spaced DFE (6,4) and transmit power of 11.5 dBm can meet 5% outage with 28.2 Mbps capacity. GMSK with Tspaced DFE (6,4) and 10 dBm transmit power achieves the same outage probability with 29 Mbps capacity. OFDM with QPSK modulation on 16 sub-channels and 17 dBm transmit power achieves a capacity of 25 Mbps with 5% outage. The estimated power consumption of the core signal processing elements is presented. Taking both bandwidth efficiency and power efficiency into account, OFDM is the favorable for such applications. But efficient PAP reduction methods and coding schemes must be applied to OFDM to achieve such performance.

REFERENCES
[1] Radio Equipment and Systems (RES), High Performance Radio Local Area Network (HIPERLAN): Functional Specifications, ETSI, Draft Proposal, Jan. 25, 1995. [2] Takanashi, H., Morikura, M., Van Nee, R., OFDM Physical Layer Specification for the 5 GHz Band, Doc:IEEE P802.11-98/72-r5, July 1998. [3] Cho, K.H., Putnam, J., Berg, E., Daneshrad, B., Samueli, H., 30 Mbps Wireless Dada Transmission Using an Equalized 5-Mbaud M-QAM Testbed, Proc. of