Inter-Carrier Interference Cancellation for OFDM Systems with Macrodiversity and Multiple Frequency Offsets

Macrodiversity provides improved coverage in wireless communications. It isused in single frequency networks (SFN), and in some cellular systems, whena mobile is in a soft handoff. The combination of OFDM and macrodiversity isvery attractive for the ability of OFDM to cope with delay spread resultingfrom macrodiversity. However, such system is very sensitive to poor frequencysynchronization among transmitters, which results in multiple frequencyoffsets. These cause inter-carrier interference (ICI), which severely degradesperformance. In this paper we quantify the degradation, providing expressionsfor the receiver SINR, and find the optimum receiver frequencysynchronization. Furthermore, we propose to mitigate ICI degradation usinglinear and decision feedback interference cancellation. In each case, weprovide a solution using both the decorrelating and the MMSE criteria.Simulation results show that, for macrodiversity OFDM, our approach resultsin significantly improved performance and robustness to frequency offsets.