Common Phase Error due to Phase Noise in OFDM - Estimation and Suppression.pdf

COMMON PHASE ERROR DUE TO PHASE NOISE IN OFDM - ESTIMATION AND SUPPRESSION Denis Petrovic, Wolfgang Rave and Gerhard Fettweis Vodafone Chair for Mobile Communications, Dresden University of Technology, Helmholtzstrasse 18, Dresden, Germany {petrovic,rave,fettweis}@ifn.et.tu-dresden.de Abstract - Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has already become a very attractive modulation scheme for many applications. Unfortunately OFDM is very sensitive to synchronization errors, one of them being phase noise, which is of great importance in modern WLAN systems which target high data rates and tend to use higher frequency bands because of the spectrum availability. In this paper we propose a linear Kalman filter as a means for tracking phase noise and its suppression. The algorithm is pilot based. The performance of the proposed method is investigated and compared with the performance of other known algorithms. Keywords - OFDM, Synchronization, Phase noise, WLAN I. INTRODUCTION OFDM has been applied in a variety of digital commu- nications applications. It has been deployed in both wired systems (xDSL) and wireless LANs (IEEE802.11a). This is mainly due to the robustness to frequency selective fading. The basic principle of OFDM is to split a high data rate data stream into a number of lower rate streams which are transmitted simultaneously over a number of orthogonal subcarriers. However this most valuable feature, namely orthogonality between the carriers, is threatened by the presence of phase noise in oscillators. This is especially the case, if bandwidth efficient higher order modulations need to be employed or if the spacing between the carriers is to be reduced. To compensate for phase noise several methods have been proposed. These can be divided into time domain [1][2] and frequency domain approaches [3][4][5]. In this paper we propose an algorithm for tracking the average phase noise offset also known as the common phase error (CPE)[6] in the frequency