Performance analysis of diversity techniques for OFDM and base station cooperation

Abstract

The main goal of the next generation wireless communication systems is to provide high data rate services. In order to deal with performance-limiting challenges that include frequency selective fading channels, power and bandwidth constraints, multiple input multiple output (MIMO) and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) techniques have been proposed as effective techniques to combat fading and to provide high rate reliable transmission. In this thesis we first give an overview of WiMAX as an example of an OFDM system and study the performance of the WiMAX physical layer under different MIMO techniques. We also analyze space-frequency coding and propose a threaded algebraic space-time (TAST) based code. Secondly, since the mobile bandwidth is an expensive and scarce resource, it seems likely that a high frequency reuse will be employed in the future cellular networks to increase spectral efficiency. This means that base stations (BSs) will operate in the same frequency band and therefore cause cochannel interference (CCI) to the users at other cells. CCI is an important performance degrading factor. Therefore our second aim is to investigate BS cooperation techniques to mitigate CCI. We assume that channel state information (CSI) is available at the cooperating BSs and analyze the performance gains due to cooperation when used in conjunction with Alamouti space-time coding.