Successive Multipath Interference Cancellation for CP-Free OFDM Systems

Traditional orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems mitigate multipath interferences with the help of a cyclic prefix (CP) appended between two adjacent OFDM blocks. The length of the CP must be made longer than channel delay spread to avoid intersymbol interference (ISI). The use of CPs degrades spectrum efficiency significantly, which is a deal price paid in all existing OFDM systems. Motivated to deal with this issue, this paper proposes a CP-free OFDM scheme with successive multipath interference cancellation (SMIC), which does not require CPs and removes ISI before fast Fourier transform (FFT) at a receiver using stored feedback equalization (SFE). The SFE operation leaves a CP gap between adjacent OFDM blocks, and the CP is regenerated with estimated signals. In this way, we convert linearly shifted OFDM blocks induced by multipath propagation back to cyclically shifted OFDM blocks for successful FFT operation. SMIC-OFDM achieves a much higher spectrum efficiency than traditional OFDM owing to the save of CPs in transmission signals. The performance of SMIC-OFDM in terms of the bit error rate, capacity, and computational complexity is compared to that of traditional OFDM to verify the effectiveness of the proposed SMIC-OFDM scheme.