On transmission performance of OFDM-based schemes using MMSE-FDE in a frequency-selective fading channel

There has been greatly increasing interest in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) for broadband wireless transmission due to its robustness against multipath fading. However, OFDM signals have high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), and thus, a power amplifier must be operated with a large input power backoff (IBO). Recently, OFDM combined with time division multiplexing (OFDM/TDM) using minimum mean square error-frequency domain equalization (MMSE-FDE) has been presented to reduce the PAPR, while improving the bit error rate (BER) performance of conventional OFDM. In this article, by extensive computer simulation, we present a comprehensive performance comparison of OFDM-based schemes in a nonlinear and frequency-selective fading channel. We discuss about the transmission performance of OFDM-based schemes with respect to the transmit peak-power, the achievable capacity, the BER performance, and the signal bandwidth. Our results show that OFDM/TDM using MMSE-FDE achieves a lower peak-power and capacity than conventional OFDM, which means significant reduction of amplifier transmit-power backoff, but with a slight decrease in signal bandwidth occupancy.