Performance of BICM-OFDM systems in UWB interference

In this paper, we develop an analytical framework for performance analysis of generic bit-interleaved coded modulation orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (BICMOFDM) systems impaired by ultra-wideband (UWB) interference. For practical relevance we consider multi-band OFDM (MB-OFDM), direct-sequence UWB (DS-UWB), and impulseradio UWB (IR-UWB) interference formats following recent IEEE/ECMA standards or standard proposals. Besides the exact analysis we calculate the bit error rate (BER) for the case when the UWB interference is modeled as additional Gaussian noise. Our results show that in general the BER of the BICM-OFDM system strongly depends on the UWB format and the OFDM sub-carrier spacing. While the Gaussian approximation is very accurate for DS-UWB, it may severely overor underestimate the true BER for MB-OFDM and IR-UWB interference. Our analysis is applicable to e.g. IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs), IEEE 802.16 wireless access systems (WiMAX), and 4th generation mobile communication systems. Furthermore, since the ECMA MB-OFDM standard is also based on the BICM-OFDM concept, our analysis can also be used to evaluate the impact of other UWB signals on ECMA MB-OFDM UWB systems.