Chennai and Dr.

MGR University Second International Conference on Sustainable Energy and Intelligent System (SEISCON 2011) ,
Dr. M.G.R. University, Maduravoyal, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. July. 20-22, 2011.

Performance analysis of CFO mitigation algorithms

in Asynchronous Cooperative OFDM
Communication system
Shamganth Kumarapandian*, M.P.Reena†
*Assistant Professor, Ibra College of Technology, Sultanate of Oman, shamkanth@ict.edu.om
†Assistant Professor, Sri Venkateswara College of Engineering, India, mpreena@svce.ac.in

Keywords: Carrier frequency offset, Cooperative and Non-Coop- in a multi-user scenario can “share” their antennas in a manner
erative system, Cyclic prefix, OFDMA that creates a virtual MIMO system.
The mobile wireless channel suffers from fading, meaning
that the signal attenuation can vary significantly over the course of
Abstract a given transmission. Transmitting independent copies of the sig-
In this paper, we analyze the non-cooperative Orthogonal Fre- nal generates diversity and can effectively combat the deleterious
quency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and Cooperative-OFDM effects of fading. In particular, spatial diversity is generated by
communication system by comparing their performances. Carrier transmitting signals from different locations, thus allowing inde-
frequency offset (CFO) mitigation is critical for OFDM based co- pendently faded versions of the signal at the receiver. Cooperative
operative transmissions because even small CFO per transmitter communication generates this diversity in a new and interesting
may lead to severe performance loss, especially when the number way. One of the major hurdles to cooperative transmissions is the
of cooperative transmitters is large. Here, we showed that cyclic
synchronization and coordination among the cooperative nodes.
prefix (CP) can be exploited to mitigate or even remove completely
However, for cooperative array, synchronization becomes either
the CFO. The mitigation performance increases along with the
a difficult problem or requires extra cost in order to be achieved.
CP length. In particular, long CP with length proportional to N*I,
where N is the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) block length and I is “Coordination” is the networking-level activity for the nodes to
the number of cooperative transmitters, can guarantee a complete get tuned, for which much research has been conducted in the
CFO removal. While this comes with a reduction in bandwidth ef- networking and above layers. In contrast, “synchronization” is for
ficiency, the long CP in the proposed scheme is exploited to enhance the cooperative nodes to achieve identical timing and frequency.
transmission power efficiency in a way similar to spread-spectrum This usually has to be conducted in the physical layer. This paper
systems, and thus is different from conventional CP that degrades analyzes the synchronization problems in time and frequency.
both bandwidth and power efficiency. Here we showed that how
performance of mitigation algorithm vary with cyclic prefix length
and performance evaluation in case of error up in the estimation of
2 Literature Review
carrier frequency offset (CFO).Comparing the performance of this
The authors in [2], [3] have considered cooperation between in-
mitigation algorithm with Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple
tra-cell users in a code division multiple access (CDMA) cellular
Access (OFDMA) mitigation algorithm for different carrier fre-
quency offset values. network. In this case, cooperation results in higher data rates and
leads to lower power requirements for users. As well, the system
is less sensitive to channel variations.
1 Introduction Relaying of signals, as viewed from the physical layer, is not
The advantages of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) sys- a trivial issue. The authors in [4], [5], [6] have provided several
tems have been widely acknowledged, to the extent that certain physical layer relay algorithms.
transmit diversity methods (i.e., Alamouti signaling) have been These include amplify and-forward, decode-and-forward and
incorporated into wireless standards. Although transmit diversity selection relaying. In amplify-and-forward, a node amplifies it’s
is clearly advantageous on a cellular base station, it may not be receive symbol, subject to a power constraint, before re-transmit-
practical for other scenarios. Specifically, due to size, cost, or ting to the next node. This algorithm is obviously with low com-
hardware limitations, a wireless agent may not be able to sup- plexity. In decode-and-forward, a node fully decodes a symbol,
port multiple transmit antennas. Examples include most handsets re-encodes it and then re-transmits it. In other words, this scheme
(size) or the nodes in a wireless sensor network (size, power). attempts to eliminate channel distortion and noise at each node. In
This paper gives an overview of cooperative communication, selection relaying, a node only re-transmits a symbol if the mea-
which allows single-antenna mobiles to reap some of the benefits sured receiving channel gain is above a certain threshold. If the
of MIMO systems. The basic idea is that single-antenna mobiles threshold is not reached, the relay requests a re-transmission from

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the sender. In networking terminology, this is a type of automatic mobile to receive the other, in which case. it can forward some
repeat request (ARQ) scheme. The authors in [5], [6] have investi- version of “overheard” information along with its own data. Be-
gated cooperation for the classical relay channel introduced in [6]. cause the fading paths from two mobiles are statistically indepen-
Outage probability is used to characterize performance. Outage dent, this generates spatial diversity.
probability is the probability that the mutual information between
the transmitter and receiver does not reach a certain throughput
threshold. Without cooperation, the outage probability decays
proportionally with 1/SNR, where SNR is the signal-to-noise ra-
tio of the channel. Using cooperation and the amplify-and-for-
ward scheme, the outage probability decays proportionally with
, achieving full diversity. This results in large power savings for
the transmitter.
The authors in [3], [4] have investigated cooperation for a sin-
gle path of relays connected in series. The motivation for this net-
work structure is that broader wireless coverage can be achieved,
while still maintaining a low power constraint at the transmitter. Figure 1 : Cooperative communication
The authors consider analog relaying and digital relaying as two In a cooperative communication system, unlike the relay
possible relay algorithms. These are equivalent to the amplify- channel model, each wireless user is assumed to both transmit
and-forward and decode-and-forward algorithms, respectively. data as well as act as a cooperative agent for another user shown
The authors in [7],[8] have investigated how carrier frequency in Figure 2.
offset and time frequency offset will affect the performance of
Cooperative STBC OFDM communication and designed an algo-
rithm to mitigate carrier frequency offset and time offset. In [7],
analyze the performance of STBC-OFDM cooperative transmis-
sions, compare them with non-cooperative ones, and propose a
joint ICI (inter carrier interference) mitigation and STBC decod-
ing algorithm. In [8], they showed that cyclic prefix (CP) can be
exploited to mitigate or even remove completely the carrier fre-
quency offset (CFO). The mitigation performance increases along
with the CP length.
Figure 2 : In Cooperative Communication each mobile act both
While the CFO problem is still mostly open for research in
as a user and relay
cooperative OFDM systems, is an extensively studied subject in
either single-user OFDM systems [17]–[19] or multi-user OFDM A high research effort has been lately put into the study of
systems [16]–[24]. One of the ways for avoiding the CFO prob- cooperative communications within wireless networks [5], [9]. It
lem in practice is for the receiver to feedback the estimated CFO is important to mention that cooperative communications can be
to the transmitters so that the latter can adjust their carriers for considered in different types of wireless networks, including in-
perfect synchronization [20], [21]. However, this approach has frastructure based networks, where intermediate nodes can either
extra costs in both bandwidth and power [22]. For OFDMA sys- be fixed relay nodes or mobile terminals cooperating with other
tems, CFO can be mitigated by exploiting the fact that different users’ terminals. In all this cases the principle of cooperative com-
transmitters are assigned with different OFDM subcarriers so that munications is the same: to exploit the broadcast nature of wire-
their signals can be easily separated [23]. For general multi-user less networks, where transmitted messages from a certain node
OFDM systems, some iterative interference cancellation schemes can be ’heard’ from any of the neighbouring nodes, and achieve a
have been developed, including [19],[22]. Based on the fact that certain performance and coverage gain.
the fast Fourier transform (FFT) operation conducted by the re-
ceiver reduces the CFO-induced interference to some extent, the 3.1 System Model for Cooperative OFDM
interference cancellation approach can often satisfactorily mitigate
CFO. Nevertheless, their performance is limited by the signal-to-
communication
interference ratio of the post-FFT signals [22], which means the Cooperative transmissions have attracted great attention recently.
performance may in particular degrade when more transmitters By sharing the antennas of multiple distributed transmitters or
are involved, or when larger CFO is encountered, or when the receivers to create virtual antenna arrays, cooperative transmis-
same subcarrier is shared by different transmitters simultaneously sions have been shown to enhance bandwidth efficiency, power
which is typical in cooperative transmissions. efficiency, reliability, etc. An important form of cooperative trans-
missions is to adapt the existing antenna array techniques, such as
3 Cooperative Communications in space-time block codes (STBC) [24], into the distributed environ-
ment [1]. This has great importance in practical wireless networks
Wireless Networks considering that small wireless nodes may not be able to have
physical antenna arrays, while antenna array techniques are vi-
Figure 1 shows two mobile agents communicating with the same able to their performance As far as the distributed implementation
destination. Each mobile has one antenna and cannot individually is concerned, one of the major issues is the synchronization of
generate spatial diversity. However, it may be possible for one the cooperative transmitters. The “synchronization” in this paper

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 Chennai and Dr.MGR University Second International Conference on Sustainable Energy and Intelligent System

refers specifically to the synchronization of the carrier frequency bandwidth efficiency for complete CFO cancellation.
and arrival timing of all cooperative transmitters, i.e., their signals
should have the same carrier frequency and timing when arriving
at a receiver. Using the receiver’s local carrier and timing as refer-
ences, perfect synchronization means zero carrier frequency off-
set (CFO) and zero timing-phase offset TPO) [1]. Without such a
perfect synchronization, many existing antenna array techniques
such as STBC cannot be directly used in cooperative transmis-
sions [25]. Unfortunately, in distributed environment it is difficult
to guarantee perfect synchronization because clock drifting, oscil-
lator parameter drifting, propagation distance, Doppler shifting, Figure 4: Structure of OFDM signal with long CP for complete
etc., may be different among the transmitters and may be ran- CFO cancellation
domly time varying.
As shown in Figure 3 the Source node, who has the data pack- This scheme enhances transmission power efficiency by the
et, can broadcast the data packet to the other cooperative nodes. long CP while guaranteeing complete CFO cancellation in a com-
Cooperative node applies decode and forward (DF) cooperative putationally efficient manner.
diversity technique.
4 Simulation results
1
4.1 Performance of CFO mitigation algorithm in Co-
2 operative OFDM System
S D
To evaluate the performance of mitigation algorithm, we simu-
lated a system with two cooperative transmitters and one receiver,
using Alamouti STBC. Simulation parameters were shown be-
I low.
Table 1: Simulation Parameters
Figure 3: Cooperative relay Transmissions
Here we assumed that all cooperative nodes decode the infor- Design Parameters Values
mation without any error. Then all cooperative nodes will have Number of sub carriers N= 32
same data. Once all the nodes have the same data packet, then
they can conduct distributed cooperative encoded transmission. Cyclic prefix length Ng = 40
Fading channel type Rayleigh fading
3.2 Performance of CFO mitigation Algorithm Channel Model Tapped delay line
3.2.1 CFO mitigation under short CP Number of taps L=4
Modulation QPSK
The performance of the CFO mitigation algorithm depends on the
length of CP. Short CP length can guarantee a certain level of Number of transmitters 2
CFO mitigation only, complete CFO cancellation is possible us- Number of receivers 1
ing long CP. The choice of the parameters determines the level of Cooperative encoding STBC encoder
CFO mitigation. In this case, the CFO can always be completely
cancelled, because is I*Q with value. Cooperative decoding STBC decoder

It is shown in Figure 4 that the performance of CFO mitiga-

§1 .... 1·¸
¨ tion algorithm will vary with parameter r(m) (m=10,20,32), this m
(1)
B0 ¨M M¸ value depends on CP length. Con-RX means conventional receiv-
¨ ¸ er without mitigation algorithm. Above Fig shows the tradeoff be-
¨1
© L 1¸¹ tween the CP length and the CFO mitigation performance. It can
be seen clearly that the CFO mitigation performance increases
Unfortunately, when the CP is short (mQ-1 is too small), for with longer CP, up to a perfect CFO cancellation when r (32) is
many other subcarriers k , the CFO cannot be cancelled complete- used. Here relative delay is 0.1.
ly. But rather, we can only mitigate the CFO to some extent. A Note that rCFO is defined as the maximum absolute difference
moderate increase of CP length can greatly enhance CFO mitiga- of the transmitters’ CFOs, i.e.,
tion capability.
rCFO max i  j (2)
3.2.2 CFO Cancellation under Long CP i , j

The structure of the OFDM signal with the long CP specified is il- Figure 5 shows the performance of our algorithm in com-
lustrated in Figure 4. It appears that we have to sacrifice too much bating delay. We set the relative delay of the signals of the two

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 Performance analysis of CFO mitigation algorithms in Asynchronous Cooperative OFDM Communication system

transmitters as 3, 5, 7 (i.e.d0=0, d1=3, 5, 7), and the relative CFO order to evaluate the robustness of algorithm to CFO estimation er-
(rCFO) between them as 0.1. rors, we simulated the case when the receiver had CFO estimation
error up to . Specifically, if the CFO estimation error for the ith
transmitter’s signal is up to , then the estimated CFO is uniformly
distributed in . In our simulations, the receiver randomly gener-
ated the estimated CFO within this range, and used it to calculate
the matrix X for CFO mitigation. The results are shown in Figure
8, from which we can see that CFO estimation error degrades the
performance of our algorithm. Nevertheless, at least for , our al-
gorithm still has desirable CFO mitigation performance. Note that
many CFO estimation algorithms have estimation accuracy well
within this error range.

Figure 5: Performance of CFO mitigation algorithm with different

cyclic prefix
From Figure 5 it is clear that mitigation algorithm does not
vary much with different relative delay times. Below figure
shows how performance of mitigation algorithm will vary with
different relative CFO values.

Figure 7: Performance of mitigation algorithm at different rCFO

Figure 6: Performance of algorithm with different delays

Figure 6 shows the performance of CFO mitigation algorithm
at different relative carrier frequency offset values. From figure it
is clear that, even at worst case rCFO=0.5). The performance is Figure 8: Performance of algorithm under CFO estimation errors
less than 3 dB worse compared with the “Perfect” OFDM. The up to ' for SNR =15, SNR =20, SNR =25
slight performance degradation may again be mainly due to the In Figure 8, it is shown that the mitigation algorithm has a per-
noise amplification effect of the linear CFO mitigation procedure. formance almost independent of the size of CFO, which clearly
Conventional OFDM receiver “Conv.RX” did not work here. In demonstrates the advantage of complete CFO cancellation. For a

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 Chennai and Dr.MGR University Second International Conference on Sustainable Energy and Intelligent System

wide range of rCFO from 0 to 1, our algorithm can successfully Table 2: Simulation Parameters for OFDMA
mitigate CFO. The slight variation in symbol error rate (SER), Design Parameters Values
which shows that the noise amplification effect of our algorithm
Number of users 2
depends on ejei – ejei which is a periodic function. Figure 11 shows
that the performances of mitigation algorithm doest not change Number of Subcarriers per user N=32
with value of CFO. Cyclic prefix length Ng =N/4
Fading channel type Rayleigh fading
4.2 Comparison of OFDMA CFO Mitigation algo- Channel Model Tapped delay line
rithms Number of taps L=4
OFDMA simulation parameters used for the simulation are shown Modulation QPSK
in Table 2.
From Figure 9 it is clear that the proposed algorithm for CFO
mitigation is does not depend on the value of relative CFO but
5 Conclusion
conventional method depends on relative CFO. In this paper cooperative and non-cooperative communication
system performances were compared. It is identified from the re-
sults that the CFO mitigation performance increases with the cy-
clic prefix length. Proposed long CP method enhances the trans-
mission power efficiency and is different from conventional CP
that degrades both bandwidth and power efficiency. Performance
of mitigation algorithm varies with cyclic prefix length. The per-
formance of the proposed mitigation algorithm is compared with
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) miti-
gation algorithms for different carrier frequency offset values. It
shows the promising results for the proposed algorithm.

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Biographies
synchronization scheme for multiuser OFDM,” IEEE J. Sel.
Shamganth received his B.E degree in Electronics & Communi-
Areas Commun., vol. 17, no. 11, pp. 1900–1914, Nov. 1999.
cation Engineering from Bharthidasan University, India, in 2000.
[18] S. Barbarossa, M. Pompili, and G. B. Giannakis, “Chan-
And M.E degree in Communication Sytems from Anna Univer-
nel-independent synchronization of orthogonal frequency
sity, India, in 2004.From 2004 to 2008 he was with VIT Univer-
division multiple access systems,” IEEE J. Sel. Areas Com-
sity as a Senior Lecturer. In 2008 he joined with Ibra College of
mun., vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 474–486, Feb. 2002.
Technology, Oman. His current research interest includes MIMO-
[19] J. Choi, C. Lee, H. W. Jung, and Y. H. Lee, “Carrier fre-
OFDM, Wireless LAN and VoWLAN. He is a Member of IET.
quency offset compensation for uplink of OFDM-OFDMA
system,” IEEE Commun. Lett., vol. 4, no. 12, pp. 414–416,
Dec. 2000. M. P. Reena received her B.E degree in Electronics & Communi-
[20] J. J. Beek and P. O. Borjesson et al., “A time and frequency cation Engineering from Madras University, India, in 2001. And
synchronization scheme for multiuser OFDM,” IEEE J. Sel. M.E degree in Communication Systems from Anna University,
Areas Commun., vol. 17, no. 11, pp. 1900–1914, Nov. 1999. India, in 2004. From 2004 to 2008 she was with VIT University as
[21] S. Barbarossa, M. Pompili, and G. B. Giannakis, “Chan- a Lecturer. In 2010 she joined with Sri Venkateswara Engineering
nel-independent synchronization of orthogonal frequency College, India as an Assistant Professor in Electronics & Com-
division multiple access systems,” IEEE J. Sel. Areas Com- munication Engineering department. Her current interest includes
mun., vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 474–486,Feb. 2002. Wireless Communication & Networks.

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