Receive diversity for mobile OFDM systems

Abstract

We investigate receive diversity for OFDM-based broadband communication systems. We consider the use of multiple antennas to combat time-selective fading and OFDM transmission in combination with an appropriate guard interval to suppress intersymbol interference. The receive diversity scheme is located in the frequency-domain and we derive different linear estimators, hereafter referred to as diversity equalizers. We show that the carrier-based solution for the optimum linear MMSE estimator-which is the least complex solution that maximizes the overall SNR is the well known maximum ratio combiner (MRC). Furthermore, we present a performance analysis for the proposed diversity equalizers and compare theoretical results to a simulated system which uses channel state information for MRC.