Differential modulation techniques for a 34 MBit/s radio channel using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing

The orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technique has been proposed for terrestrial digital transmission systems due to its high spectral efficiency, its robustness in different multipath propagation environments and the ability of avoiding intersymbol interference (ISI). Our studies consider a radio channel bandwidth of 8 MHz and a data rate of 34 Mbit/s.In the case of the OFDM transmission system a coherent 64-QAM requires a channel estimation process and a channel equalization in frequency-selective interference situations 4]. The equalization process can be realized by a multiplier bank at the FFT output in the receiver, a so-called frequency-domain equalizer. Alternatively, a multilevel differential modulation technique, the so-called differential amplitude and phase shift keying (64-DAPSK) considering the phase and simultaneously the amplitude for differential modulation, is proposed and presented in this paper. Differential modulation/demodulation techniques do not require any explicit knowledge about the radio channel properties in the differential channel equalization. It is therefore not necessary to implement a frequency-domain equalizer in an OFDM/64-DAPSK receiver, which reduces the computation complexity. The performance of both modulation techniques has been analysed in the uncoded and coded case referring to Gaussian and frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channels. Simulation results are presented in this paper.The OFDM signal has a non-constant envelope with large instantaneous power spikes possible primarily resulting in an overdriving of the high power amplifier (HPA) at the transmitter. This leads to nonlinear distortion causing intermodulation noise and spectral spreading. Both effects can be limited by introducing an appropriate input backoff (IBO). In this paper the performance of OFDM signals in the presence of nonlinearities is analysed quantitatively.