1608
4, APRIL 2009
Lattice-Reduction Aided Equalization for OFDM Systems
Xiaoli Ma, Member, IEEE, Wei Zhang, Student Member, IEEE, and Ananthram Swami, Fellow, IEEE
Abstract—Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing
(OFDM) is an effective technique to deal with frequency-
selective channels since it facilitates low complexity equalization
and decoding. Many existing OFDM designs successfully exploit
the multipath diversity offered by frequency-selective channels.
However, most of them require maximum likelihood (ML) or
near-ML detection at the receiver, which is of high complexity.
On the other hand, empirical results have shown that linear
detectors have low complexity but offer inferior performance.
In this paper, we analytically quantify the diversity orders of
linear equalizers for linear precoded OFDM systems, and prove
that they are unable to collect full diversity. To improve the
performance of linear equalizers, we further propose to use a
lattice reduction (LR) technique to help collect diversity. The
LR-aided linear equalizers are shown to achieve maximum
diversity order (i.e., the one collected by the ML detector), but
with low complexity that is comparable to that of conventional
linear equalizers. The theoretical findings are corroborated by
simulation results.
Index Terms—OFDM, diversity, linear equalizers, lattice re-
duction.
I. I NTRODUCTION
O RTHOGONAL frequency division multiplexing
(OFDM) is known to be an effective method to
deal with frequency-selective channels since it facilitates
low-complexity equalization and (de)coding. However, an
uncoded OFDM design neither guarantees symbol recovery,
nor collects multipath diversity to combat fading [16]. One
way to recover symbol detectability for single antenna OFDM
systems is to use the linear precoding (a.k.a. linear complex-
field coding) techniques presented in [9],[16], which collect
multipath diversity but at the cost of increased decoding
complexity due to the need for maximum likelihood (ML) or
near-ML methods.
To reduce the complexity, linear equalizers (LEs) such as
zero-forcing (ZF) and linear minimum mean square error
(MMSE) equalizers are often adopted. It is well-known that
Manuscript received September 4, 2007; revised December 18, 2007
and October 23, 2008; accepted November 15, 2008. The associate editor
coordinating the review of this letter and approving it for publication was S.
Aissa.
This material is based on work supported by the U.S. Army Research Office
under grant no. W911NF-06-1-0090 and through collaborative participation
in the Collaborative Technology Alliance for Communications & Networks
sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory under Cooperative Agree-
ment DAAD19-01-2-0011. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce
and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copy-
right notation thereon. This paper was presented in part at the IEEE Military
Communications Conference, Oct. 17-20, 2005.
X. Ma and W. Zhang are with the School of Electrical and Computer
Engr., Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332 (e-mail: {xiaoli,
zhangw1}@ece.gatech.edu).
A. Swami is with the Army Research Lab, Adelphi, MD 20783 (e-mail:
a.swami@ieee.org).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/T-WC.2009.070987
1536-1276/09$25.00 
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 8, NO.
LEs have much lower complexity than ML and near-ML meth-
ods but also have inferior performance. Recently, it has been
shown that LEs guarantee maximum multipath diversity for
certain linear precoded (LP-) OFDM systems [15] (e.g., the
redundant precoded system in [16]). However, the decoding
complexity of the LEs in [15] is of order Nc3 , where Nc
is the number of subcarriers and is usually large (e.g., 64
in IEEE 802.11a and 1024 in IEEE 802.16e). Therefore, the
complexity may still be too high. Grouped LP-OFDM designs
have been proposed in [9] to reduce the decoding complexity
by splitting the OFDM blocks into groups and designing
the square precoder depending on the lattice structure of the
transmitted symbols. In this paper, we focus on the design in
[9]. Now the question is whether multipath diversity can still
be collected for the design in [9] if we apply LEs to reduce
decoding complexity. We prove that different from the result
in [15], the LEs for LP-OFDM systems in [9] only collect
diversity one.
Recently, lattice reduction (LR) techniques have been
used to improve the performance of LEs for MIMO (e.g.,
[4],[17]) and MIMO-OFDM systems [1]. LR-aided LEs for
V-BLAST systems have been analyzed and shown to be able
to help collect the receive diversity of MIMO systems in flat-
fading channels without significantly increasing complexity
[10],[11],[14]. In this paper, we apply LR-aided LEs to decode
LP-OFDM and analyze their performance in terms of diversity.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section
II, the system model for LP-OFDM is briefly presented. In
Section III, the performance of LP-OFDM systems with LEs is
analyzed. LR-aided LEs for LP-OFDM systems are analyzed
in Section IV. Simulation results are presented in Section V to
corroborate our theoretical claims and Section VI concludes
the paper.
Notation: Superscript H denotes Hermitian, and T trans-
pose. We will use E[·] for expectation and rank(·) for matrix
rank; diag[x] stands for a diagonal matrix with x on its main
diagonal. I N denotes the N ×N identity matrix. C denotes the
complex field, and Z[j] the complex integer set (or Gaussian
integer ring) whose elements are √ of the form M + jN , where
M, N are integers and j = −1. Unless explicitly stated
otherwise, we denote the n-th element of a vector x by xn ,
and the (m, n)th element of a matrix X by Xm,n .
II. S YSTEM M ODEL OF LP-OFDM
Suppose that a frequency-selective fading channel has finite
impulse response with L + 1 taps. Channel taps are denoted
by a vector h = [h0 , h1 , . . . , hL ]T and modeled as a zero-
mean complex Gaussian random vector. Let Rh denote the
channel correlation matrix whose rank is ρh (ρh ≤ L + 1).
With Nc denoting the number of subcarriers, and Ts denoting
c 2009 IEEE
 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 8, NO. 4, APRIL 2009 1609

the input symbol interval, Nc is chosen so that L << Nc the performance of LP-OFDM designs with LEs using ZF
to enhance efficiency, and (Nc + L)Ts is much less than the equalizer as an example. We will keep our proofs general so
channel coherence time so that the channel can be modeled that they can be applied to other linear precoders. For brevity,
as static over an OFDM symbol duration. The input sequence we will drop the group index g in (1) since it is irrelevant.
s(n) is zero-mean, i.i.d., and drawn from a constellation S Mathematically, diversity is defined as the negative asymp-
which belongs to Z[j]. A standard OFDM scheme with cyclic totic slope of the average bit-error rate (BER) versus SNR
prefix (CP) is considered. plotted on a log-log scale. As in standard diversity order
The N × 1 information block s is linearly encoded by analysis (see e.g., [9],[11] - [16]), we assume that the receiver
a precoder Γ ∈ CNc ×N to obtain u = Γs ∈ CNc ×1 . has perfect channel knowledge. Based on the model in (1),
The precoded symbol vectors u are transmitted after Nc - the output of the ZF equalizer is given as:
point inverse discrete Fourier transform (IDFT) operation and
x = H −1 −1
equ y = s + H equ w = s + n, (2)
CP insertion. At the receiver, after CP removal and DFT
operations, the Nc × 1 OFDM block y is collected. where n := H −1 equ w is the noise after equalization. The
There are several ways of designing Γ to enable maximum channel matrix H equ = DH Θ has full rank with probability
diversity without any channel knowledge at the transmitter. one (wp1) because Θ is non-singular, and the diagonal matrix
One way is to design Γ as a tall Vandermonde matrix (Nc ≥ D H has full rank wp1. The noise vector n is no longer white,
N + L) with distinct generators [16]. Although transmission and its covariance matrix is given by
rate is sacrificed, it has been proved that even LEs can also
collect full multipath diversity [15]. But the complexity of E[nnH ] = σw
2
(H H
equ H equ )
−1 2
:= σw C . (3)
LEs in [15] is cubic in the block size, N , so that affordable After equalization in (2), a quantization step is required to
complexity could limit the block size, and thus decrease the map each entry of x in (2) to the symbol constellation S. Next,
efficiency. we compute the conditional pairwise error probability (PEP),
Another way is to design a square precoder Γ (Nc = N ) while the average probability of error can be bounded by the
by using algebraic number theory and grouping methods [9]. union bound (see [3, p. 514] and [12] ). Suppose that the nth
This encoder is based on the lattice-structure of the symbols, transmitted symbol is sn , and at the receiver it is erroneously
and it is different from the tall precoder in [16] in two major decoded as s̃n = sn . Following standard approaches (see e.g.,
aspects: i) it is a square matrix and thus does not introduce any [13],[15],[16]), the PEP can be written as
bandwidth loss; and ii) it depends on the lattice of the symbol
constellation. In this paper, we adopt the square precoders P (sn → s̃n |H equ ) = P (|xn − s̃n |2 < |xn − sn |2 | H equ )
 
with grouping method in [9]. The Nc subcarriers are split into |Δs |2
Ng groups, each of size K, so that the gth group is sg = =Q 2C
, (4)
2σw
[s(gK), . . . , s(gK + K − 1)]T . Group sg is linearly precoded n,n

by a K × K full-rank square precoder Θ, and the entries of where Δs := sn − s̃n , Cn,n is the (n, n)th element of C in
the precoded sub-block ug = Θsg are transmitted through K  ∞ t2
(3), and Q(x) = √12π x e− 2 dt [6, p. 20]. Let U H := Θ−1 .
equi-spaced sub-carriers. Designs of precoder Θ can be found
in [9] and references therein. Therefore, we can express the Because H equ = DH Θ, we have C = (ΘH DH H D H Θ)
−1
=
H −1 H −1
I/O relationship for the gth group as U D H (D H ) U , and hence

K−1
|Uk,n |2
y g = D H,g Θsg + wg = H equ sg + wg , (1) Cn,n = . (5)
|H(k)|2
k=0
where D H,g = diag[H(g), H(g + Ng ), . . . , H(g + (K − 1)Ng )],
H(n) = =0 h e−j2πn/Nc is the channel response at sub-
L
Recall again that |H(k)| > 0 wp1 for any k. It is clear
carrier n, and wg is the corresponding white complex Gaus- that computing the average pairwise error probability, i.e.,
sian noise for the gth group with zero mean and variance computing the expectation of the expression in (4) with respect
2 to the channel fades is complicated. Instead we develop lower
σw I. In this case, the maximum multipath diversity order is
Gd = min(K, ρh ), which is less than or equal to L+1 [9]. ML and upper bounds on Cn,n .
or near-ML methods can be used to collect multipath diversity. Using the Frobenius norm inequality AB2 ≤
However, the complexity is still high if the group size is large. A2 B2 , we obtain
A natural question is: What is the diversity if we use an LE in K−1  K−1
  1
order to reduce complexity? In the next section, we analyze Cn,n ≤ |Uk,n |2
the performance of LEs for LP-OFDM systems and answer |H(k)|2
k=0 k=0
this question. K−1 
 K an
≤ |Uk,n |2 := ,
mink |H(k)|2 mink |H(k)|2
III. D IVERSITY OF L INEAR E QUALIZERS FOR k=0

LP-OFDM S YSTEMS  2
where an = K K−1k=0 |Uk,n | and 0 < an < ∞, since Θ is
Recently, it has been shown in [15] that LEs collect multi- Vandermonde and non-singular. We next lower-bound Cn,n as
path diversity for LP-OFDM systems with tall Vandermonde

K−1
|Uk,n |2 |Uc,n |2 bn
precoders in [16], while it is unclear on the performance of Cn,n = ≥ := ,
|H(k)| 2 |H(c)| 2 |H(c)|2
LEs with the square precoders in [9]. In this section, we study k=0

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 1610 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 8, NO. 4, APRIL 2009

where c ∈ [0, K − 1] is chosen such that bn = |Uc,n |2 is we conclude that for LP-OFDM design in [9], LEs and
nonzero. Thus, we have established upper and lower bounds DFE can only exploit diversity one, though they have much
on Cn,n : lower decoding complexity relative to their ML or near-ML
counterparts.
bn an
≤ Cn,n ≤ .
|H(c)|2 mink |H(k)|2
IV. LR-A IDED L INEAR E QUALIZATION FOR LP-OFDM
This leads to bounds on the conditional error probability in
As shown in (3), if H equ in (1) is orthogonal, i.e.,
(4):
  HH equ H equ is diagonal, the covariance matrix of the noise
|Δs |2 |H(c)|2 after ZF equalization is still diagonal, which means the ZF
Q 2
≤ P (sn → s̃n |H equ ) equalizer has the same performance as the ML decoder.
2σw bn
  However, in general, H equ is not orthogonal, and thus the ZF
|Δs |2 mink |H(k)|2 equalizer has inferior performance relative to the ML equalizer
≤Q 2
. as shown in Section III. Lattice reduction (LR) is one way
2σw an
to transform H equ closer to an orthogonal matrix. The LR
(6)
process finds a set of bases that is closer to orthogonality than
To continue the analysis, the following lemma is useful. the columns of H equ but spans the same lattice, and thus
Lemma 1: Let X1 , X2 , . . . , XN be N possibly dependent makes the decision region of the LEs more like those of the
central Chi-square random variables, each with 2D degrees ML detector and improves performance [11]. One widely used
of freedom (DOF), and let Xmin := min(X1 , ..., XN ). Then, LR algorithm is the Lenstra-Lenstra-Lovász (LLL) reduction
P (Xmin < ) ≤ N ( 2 )D . method [8]. Details of the complex LLL (CLLL) algorithm
The proof is given in Appendix A. Since |H(k)|2 is expo- can be found in [4], [11] and references therein. Existing
nentially distributed (or Chi-square distributed with 2 DOF), results in [1],[8],[10],[17] show that the LR process improves
according to Lemma 1, we have the average error probability the performance of linear detectors over MIMO flat-fading
  
−1 channels and MIMO-OFDM systems without significantly
|Δs |2 mink |H(k)|2 1 |Δs |2 increasing complexity. In this section, we show how to apply
Pe ≤ EH Q 2
≤ Kan 2
.
2σw an 2 σw complex LR-aided LEs to LP-OFDM systems and we also
analyze the performance of LR-aided LEs.
Therefore, the upper bound in (6) shows diversity one. Since
|H(c)|2 is Chi-square distributed with 2 DOF, carrying out the
integration on the left inequality in (6) gives a lower bound A. LR-aided Linear Equalization
of Pe as [13, Sec. 14.4]: Given the system model in (1), we adopt the CLLL
  
−1 algorithm to reduce the lattice basis of H equ and obtain
|Δs |2 |H(c)|2 |Δs |2 H̃ = H equ T , where T is a unimodular matrix, which means
Pe ≥ EH Q 2
≈ bn 2
,
2σw bn σw that (i) all the entries of T and T −1 are Gaussian integers,
and (ii) the determinant of T is ±1 or ±j. Given H equ and
which shows that the lower bound also has diversity one1 .
fixed parameters of the CLLL algorithm in [11], T is unique.
Thus, we established the following result. −1
Proposition 1: Given the model in (1), if the channel taps Then, we apply the LR-aided ZF equalizer H̃ instead of
are zero-mean complex Gaussian, then the ZF equalizer in (2) H −1
equ , and the output can be written as [cf. (2)]:
exists wp1 and collects diversity order 1. −1 −1
x = H̃ y = T −1 s + H̃ w = z + n. (7)
Therefore, although the ZF equalizer has low complexity,
it only collects diversity one when a square precoder is used. We can estimate z from x in (7) by quantization. After ob-
This should be contrasted with the case in [15] where a ZF taining ẑ, we can recover s by mapping T ẑ to the appropriate
equalizer was able to collect full diversity for the ungrouped constellation, ŝ = Q(T ẑ). The detailed algorithm can be
case provided that Nc ≥ N + L, and the precoding matrix found in [4],[11]. Furthermore, with respect to an extended
Θ was assumed to have full row k-rank, a much stronger system, the LR-aided MMSE equalizer agrees with the LR-
condition than full rank. aided ZF equalizer [17].
Furthermore, as shown in [12], following the steps of the Compared with the conventional LEs, LR-aided LEs in-
performance analysis of MMSE equalizer in [11], it is not crease the complexity mainly in the CLLL processing. We will
difficult to verify that the MMSE equalizer also collects compare the complexity of different systems by simulations
diversity order one for LP-OFDM with precoder design in [9]. later.
The decision feedback equalizer (DFE) is another widely used
low-complexity equalizer [2]. Since ZF-DFE (MMSE-DFE) B. Performance Analysis of LR-aided Linear Equalizers
adopts ZF (MMSE) equalizer as the first step to detect the first
symbol, ZF-DFE and MMSE-DFE for the LP-OFDM systems In this section, we establish the diversity order collected by
only collect diversity one. Due to page limit, we omit the LR-aided LEs. First, the orthogonality deficiency (od) of the
proofs here and details can be found in [12]. In summary, K × K matrix H equ is (see [11, Eq. (17)])

1 When
det(H H
equ H equ )
Θ is unitary as in [9], Corollary 1 can be shown to hold with some od(H equ ) = 1 − K , (8)
2
k=1 hk 
minor changes in the constants of the bounds.

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where hk , 1 ≤ k ≤ K, is the norm of the nth column of Eq. (12) provides an upper bound for the probability that
H equ . Note that 0 ≤ od(H equ ) ≤ 1. If H equ is singular, hmin 2 is less than  as
od(H equ ) = 1, and if the columns of H equ are orthogonal, ⎛ ⎛min(K,ρ ) ⎞ ⎞
 h
od(H equ ) = 0. It has been shown that [11, Lemma 1] od(H̃) P (hmin  ≤ ) ≤ P ⎝
2
min αk ⎝ |h̄k | ⎠ ≤ ⎠
2

is upper bounded by 1 − c2δ after CLLL, where cδ is a constant a∈Z[j]K , a=0 k=1
that depends on K and CLLL parameter δ.  −D
1
In the following, we prove a lemma which composes the ≤ D min αk D := cD D , (13)
2 D! a∈Z[j]K , a=0
key step to establish the diversity claim of the LR-aided LEs
for LP-OFDM systems. where D = min(K, ρh ) and cD is a finite constant, and the
Lemma 2: Let L be a lattice in CK×1 generated by the second inequality is based on [7, Eq. (40)] when  is small.
set of bases H equ = D H Θ in (1) with complex integer Note that the proof for Lemma 2 is quite different from the
coefficients. Define hmin as the vector that has the minimum one for the i.i.d. channel case in [11]. Correlated multipath
non-zero norm among all vectors in L. Then for any  > 0, channels are covered here. Thanks to the precoder design
we have in [9], the minimum vector hmin has the same degrees of
P {hmin 2 ≤ } ≤ cD D , (9) freedom as other vectors in the lattice.
Now we are ready to quantify the diversity order collected
where the finite constant cD depends on D = min(K, ρh ) and
by the LR-aided ZF equalizer for the LP-OFDM systems,
the channel covariance matrix.
which is established in the following proposition:
Proof: Let pa = H equ a be a K ×1 vector in the lattice L with
Proposition 2: For the LP-OFDM system in (1) with group
finite elements spanned by H equ with a being a K × 1 vector
size K and frequency-selective channel order L, the diversity
with all entries belonging to the complex integer coefficient
order collected by the LR-aided ZF equalizer is min(K, ρh )
set. By definition, hmin 2 = arg min pa 2 . By
pa ∈L, pa =0 which is the same as that obtained by the ML detector.
putting the diagonal entries of D H into a K × 1 vector Proof: Given Lemma 2, inserting (9) into [11, Eq. (27)] and
hH = [H(1), . . . , H(K)], we have following [11, Eq. (28)], one can upper bound the average
pairwise error probability of LR-aided ZF equalizer as
pa 2 = H equ a2 = DH Θa2

D
−D
= hH H
H diag(Θa)diag(Θa) hH .(10)
4 (2D − 1)! 1
Pe ≤ cD , (14)
Consider the g-th group in (1); let F denote the Nc ×(L+1) c2δ (D − 1)! σw 2

DFT matrix; in M ATLAB notation, let F g := F (g : Ng : where D = min(K, ρh ). Therefore, the diversity order of the
Nc , 1 : L + 1) with size K × (L + 1). Then we have LR-aided ZF equalizer is greater than or equal to min(K, ρh ).
hH = F g h, where the (L + 1) × 1 column vector h consists Since the maximum diversity order enabled by each group
of all the L + 1 channel taps. The correlation matrix of h is min(K, ρh ), for LP-OFDM , the LR-aided ZF equalizer
is Rh = E[hH h] with rank ρh , and SVD as U h Λh U H h. collects the full diversity order min(K, ρh ).
Define a ρh × 1 vector h̃ with i.i.d. complex Gaussian entries. As we have shown, LEs cannot exploit any multipath di-
1
Then, h and U h Λh2 h̃ have identical distributions and thus the versity for LP-OFDM systems. However, after introducing the
same statistical properties. Hence, we can rewrite (10) as (in LR technique into the linear equalization process, multipath
the following, equality should be interpreted in the sense of diversity is collected. Similarly, one can show that the LR-
equivalence of distributions) aided MMSE equalizer also collects full multipath diversity.
H 1 1 Note that LR-aided LEs have some unique properties with
pa 2 = h̃ Λh2 U H H H
h F g diag[Θa]diag[Θa] F g U h Λh h̃
2
regard to complexity: i) the decoding complexity is much
H H
= h̃ Aa h̃ = h̃ U H
a Λa U a h̃
lower than that of ML detector and quite close to that of LEs;
min(K,ρh ) ii) unlike SD [5], the complexity of LR-aided ZF equalizer
H 
= h̄ Λa h̄ = αk |h̄k |2 , (11) does not depend on SNR; and iii) the complexity of the CLLL
k=1 algorithm does not change with constellation size.
where Aa with SVD as U H a Λa U a depends on a and
the correlation matrix of the channel taps, and αk , k ∈ V. S IMULATION R ESULTS
[1, min(K, ρh )] are the eigenvalues of Aa . Since F g+1 = In this section, we use simulations to verify our theoretical
F g diag[1, ej2π/Nc , . . . , ej2πL/Nc ], the analysis in (11) holds results on the diversity order of LEs and the performance of
true for any group g. Since U a contains the min(K, ρh ) rows LR-aided equalizers. All the linear precoders for OFDM we
of a unitary matrix, h̄k ’s are still i.i.d. complex Gaussian use in this section follow the designs in [9]. QPSK modulation
random variables as the entries in h̃. Thanks to the precoder is adopted, and the channel is known at the receiver.
design of Θ, all αk ’s are nonzero if a is not a zero vector, Example 1 (Linear equalizers): Let us compare the per-
i.e., there exists a nonzero minimum of αk ’s which does not formance of LP-OFDM with different equalizers to that of
depend on a [9]. From the definition of hmin , it is easy to plain OFDM. We select L = 3, and the number of subcarriers
show that Nc = 64. The channel taps are independent complex Gaus-
  ⎛min(K,ρh ) ⎞
sian random variables with zero mean and variance σ2 and
 L
hmin 2 ≥ min αk ⎝ |h̄k |2 ⎠ . (12) 2
=0 σ = 1. The subcarriers are split into Ng = 16 groups
a∈Z[j]K , a=0 k=1 with size K = 4. The channel-averaged BERs are shown

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 1612 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 8, NO. 4, APRIL 2009

0 0
10 10
LP−OFDM w/ ZF
LP−OFDM w/ MMSE
−1
LP−OFDM w/ ZF−DFE −1
10 LP−OFDM w/ MMSE−DFE 10
Plain OFDM w/ ML

−2 −2
10 10
BER

BER
−3 −3
10 10
LR−aided MMSE with K=2
LR−aided MMSE with K=3
−4 −4
10 10 LR−aided MMSE with K=4
SD with K=2
SD with K=3
−5 −5
SD with K=4
10 10
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 0 5 10 15 20 25 30
SNR in dB SNR in dB

Fig. 1. Performance comparisons of different equalizers for LP-OFDM with Fig. 3. Comparisons with different group sizes using SD and LR-aided
QPSK modulation MMSE equalizer with QPSK modulation

0 5
10 10
Simple ZF
General ZF
−1
10 LR−aided ZF
Number of Arithmetic Operations 4 SD method
10
−2
10
BER

−3 3
10 10

−4
10
2
LP−OFDM w/ LR−aided ZF 10
−5 LP−OFDM w/ LR−aided ZF−DFE
10
LP−OFDM w/ LR−aided MMSE
LP−OFDM w/ LR−aided MMSE−DFE
−6
LP−OFDM w/ ML
10 10
1
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5 5 5.5 6
SNR in dB Group Size K

Fig. 2. Comparisons among different LR-aided equalizers for LP- Fig. 4. Average complexity and standard deviation comparison of SD method
OFDM with QPSK modulation and LR-aided ZF equalizer at SNR = 30dB

in Fig. 1. For plain OFDM, we only consider symbol-by-

symbol ML detection. For LP-OFDM , we consider ZF, ZF-
DFE, MMSE, MMSE-DFE. From Fig. 1, we observe that: i)
ZF, ZF-DFE, MMSE and MMSE-DFE detectors only achieve
diversity order one, as does plain OFDM; and ii) the ZF
equalizer has the worst performance, while MMSE(-DFE) has
the best performance among these detectors. Fig. 2 shows the
BER performance of LR-aided ZF, MMSE, ZF-DFE, MMSE-
DFE, and ML detectors. From this figure, we observe that LR-
aided equalizers collect diversity order L + 1, as does the ML,
although there still exists a gap between the performance of
the LR-aided equalizers and the ML detector. The performance
of the LR-aided MMSE-DFE equalizer is better than that of
the LR-aided ZF equalizer, ZF-DFE, and MMSE.
Example 2 (Different group sizes): In this example, we
fix the total number of subcarriers Nc = 120 and channel
order L = 2; the channel taps are i.i.d. with zero mean and
1
variance L+1 . We choose different group sizes K = 2, 3, 4,
and then compare their performance. Both sphere-decoding
(SD) [5] and LR-aided MMSE equalizer are employed. Fig. 3
shows the performance for the different cases. Theoretically,
the maximum diversity order is Gd = min(K, L + 1) [9].
Based on the simulation results, we observe that the diversity
orders collected by both SD and LR-aided MMSE equalizer
are 2, 3, respectively corresponding to group sizes K = 2, 3.
When K = 4, the channel taps in each group are correlated
and their correlation matrix loses rank. We notice that our LR-
aided LE still collects full diversity which is 3, as does the
SD method. This validates our theoretical results.
Example 3 (Complexity comparison of decoding schemes):
We set the number of sub-carriers to Nc = 120 and the chan-
nel order to L = 5. Hence, the maximum multipath diversity
order is 6. To compare the complexity of different decoding
methods, we fix SNR at 30 dB and count the number of
arithmetic operations (real additions and real multiplications).
In Fig. 4, we plot four curves to represent: the SD method
[5], the LR-aided ZF equalizer, a general ZF equalizer and
a simplified ZF detector for LP-OFDM . Here, the general
ZF equalizer inverts H equ directly (i.e., (D H Θ)−1 ) and the

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 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 8, NO. 4, APRIL 2009
simplified ZF detector is ΘH D−1 H based on the knowledge
that Θ is unitary. The SD method chosen here may not be
up-to-date [5], but it is representative. The standard deviations
of the complexity are also plotted for LR-aided ZF and SD
method on each group size. From Fig. 4, we notice that, the
curve of the LR-aided ZF equalizer is much closer to that
of the general ZF detector than to that of the SD method.
This means that the decoding complexity of the LR-aided ZF
is very close to that of general ZF equalizers (about twice),
and much lower than that of the SD method. Furthermore,
the standard deviation of the complexity of LR-aided ZF is
smaller than that of the SD method. Note that the complexity
shown in Fig. 4 is in the high SNR regime. When SNR is
low, SD has much higher complexity (it is exponential for
the worst case), while LR-aided ZF equalizer still keeps the
same complexity shown in Fig. 4. In the same figure, we also
observe that the complexity of the simplified ZF equalizer is
quite low thanks to the unitary property of Θ. However, it can
only collect diversity 1. With a complexity that is a little bit
higher than that of the general ZF equalizer, the LR-aided ZF
equalizer can guarantee the diversity order of the ML detector.
VI. C ONCLUSIONS
In this paper, we have quantified the performance of linear
detectors and lattice-reduction (LR)-aided linear detectors for
linear precoded (LP) OFDM systems. We have shown that
conventional LEs for LP-OFDM can only collect diversity
1. However, by slightly increasing complexity, LR-aided LEs
provide maximum diversity, which is the same as that collected
by the ML detector. The complexity of LR-aided LEs is much
lower than those of the ML and near-ML detectors2 .
A PPENDIX
P ROOF OF L EMMA 1
According to [6, Eq. (2.10)], we know that for a central
Chi-square random variable Xn with 2D DOF, we have
  ∞   k   D
  k
D−1 
P (Xn < ) = 1−e −/2 2
=e −/2 2
≤ .
k! k! 2 50, no. 1, pp. 232–235, Jan. 2004.
k=0 k=D
Furthermore, since Xmin is the minimum of Xn ’s, we obtain

N   D
P (Xmin < ) ≤ P (Xn < ) ≤ N . (15)
n=1
2 June 2004, pp. 798–802.
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1613
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers
for their helpful comments which improved the quality of this
paper.
2 The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the
authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies,
either expressed or implied, of the Army Research Laboratory or the U.S.
Government.
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