Aspects of Delay Diversity in OFDM

Abstract

We consider several aspects of delay diversity in coded OFDM. The cyclic properties of the FFT allow to do delay diversity in a cyclic manner without exceeding the guard interval. We investigate the impact of different cyclic delays in terms of achievable diversity level, information theory and BER performance. Furthermore, we propose an interleaving and user assignment strategy which allows multiple users to exploit the full spatial diversity in an OFDMA system with appropriately chosen cyclic delays. Finally, we introduce a scheme with low delay and low reference symbol overhead for differential modulation in frequency direction which can be detected non-coherently and is able to cope with the increased frequency-selectivity which is caused by the cyclic delays.