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Abstract
This report is a tutorial on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex (OFDM) and
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA). OFDMA is the major
transmission and access technology for future mobile broadband systems like Mobile
WiMAX and 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE).
One of the key features of OFDM and OFDMA is the ability to handle multipath
propagation without complex receivers. The use of simple and cost-efficient Fast Fourier
Transform (FFT) techniques makes it easily scalable with respect to bandwidth. The
main drawback is that the signal has high amplitude variability, high so-called Peak-to-
Average-Power Ratio (PAPR), which typically reduces the efficiency of the transmitter
power amplifiers. The two major standards for mobile broadband, namely Mobile WiMAX
and 3GPP LTE are very similar in the design targets and the solutions are comparable.
From a technical and performance point of view they seem to be quite equal.
Radio planning of OFDMA networks is more equal to GSM planning than WCDMA,
because intra-cell interference is basically eliminated due to the orthogonality property.
Scalable OFDMA opens up new ideas on frequency reuse, in that the reuse factor can be
between 1 and 3 (or more) on a fractional basis. Furthermore, different cell capacities
can be tuned cooperatively, e.g. by moving capacity from one cell to another dependent
on time of day.
Keywords
OFDM, OFDMA, Wireless, Mobile, 4G, WiMAX, E-UTRA, LTE
Preface
This report is the result of a technology study performed in 2007. The aim of
the study has been to develop the competence in Telenor R&I on the multiple
access scheme OFDMA. OFDMA is the transmission and access technology to be
used in future mobile broadband systems like Mobile WiMAX and 3GPP Long
Term Evolution.
The study was finalized with an internal workshop arranged on 23 January
2008.
Contents
1 Introduction.......................................................... 1
6 Conclusions ......................................................... 50
References .................................................................. 52
1 Introduction
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex (OFDM) is a multi carrier transmission
technology which was first described by R. W. Chang in 1966 at Bell Labs. The
first patent was granted in 1970 (US patent 3488445). Later, M. Fattouche and
H. Zaghloul described how the OFDM concept can be used to provide multiple
access between different transceivers (US patent 5282222, granted in 1994).
This was the first description of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access
(OFDMA).
The first OFDM based wireless standard was probably the Eureka Digital Audio
Broadcast (DAB) standard for audio broadcasting which was released in 1995.
Two years later, in 1997, the standard for terrestrial digital television, i.e. DVB-
T, was published.
OFDM and OFDMA is now becoming the major transmission and access
technology for future mobile broadband systems. Mobile WiMAX is already
available, and 3GPP has left WCDMA in favour of OFDMA for the next generation
standard Evolved UTRA, often referred to as Long Term Evolution (LTE).
This report is a tutorial on OFDM and OFDMA, and is organized in four chapters.
First, in Chapter 2 we introduce OFDM transmission, and define and discuss all
major parameters. In Chapter 3 we explain how the OFDM concept can be
augmented to comprise multiple access as OFDMA. Chapter 4 deals with the
major standards using OFDMA. The weight has been put on Mobile WiMAX and
3GPP E-UTRA, but a brief description of other OFDM(A) based standards is also
included. Finally, in Chapter 5 radio planning for an OFDMA network is
discussed and compared with current knowledge from 2G (GSM) and 3G
(WCDMA) planning. Some examples of link budget calculations are also
presented.
2 Introduction to OFDM
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a multi-carrier
modulation scheme that transmits data over a number of orthogonal sub-
carriers. A conventional transmission uses only a single carrier modulated with
all the data to be sent. OFDM breaks the data to be sent into small chunks,
allocating each sub-data stream to a sub-carrier and the data is sent in parallel
orthogonal sub-carriers. As illustrated in Figure 1, this can be compared with a
transport company utilizing several smaller trucks (multi-carrier) instead of one
large truck (single carrier).
Single Carrier
Multi Carrier
Channel
Individual channels
bandwidth Guard band
FDM
f1 f2 f3 Frequency
Channel
Individual sub-channels
bandwidth
Bandwidth Bandwidth
saving saving
OFDM
f1 f 2 f3 Frequency
channel
channel
1 1
0.5 0.5
0 0
-0.5 -0.5
-1 -1
-1.5 -1.5
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
1 1
0.5 0.5
0 0
-0.5 -0.5
-1 -1
-1.5 -1.5
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
Figure 5 Orthogonality principle in the time domain. Leftmost graphs show the
input signal shapes over one symbol period. The rightmost graphs show the
integrand in the case of equal signal (upper) and orthogonal signal (lower). It is
easily seen that the total area under the curve when q = k is positive, while it
sums up to zero over one symbol period when the frequencies are different and
spaced 1/TU apart
Frequency domain
Time domain
N c −1
x(t) = ∑a
k =0
k ⋅ e ( j2 πkΔf t ) (3)
Adding carriers with different frequencies and modulation gives large amplitude
variations. This is the Peak Power Problem of OFDM. It can be shown that the
maximum value of the Peak to Average Power Ratio (PAPR) is the same as the
number of sub-carriers:
PAPRmax = N C (4)
AM/AM characteristic
POUT
OBO
IBO
Average Peak
PIN
[α 0 ,τ 0 ]
LOS Path
[α1 ,τ 1 ]
Reflected Path
K −1
h (t ) = ∑ α δ (t − τ
k =0
k k)
Amplitude
[α]
τ τ τ2 Time
[τ]
TC T
Frequency/subcarrier
In a real channel, the power delay profile (PDP) often follows an exponential
decay function, and our design criteria will be the amount of remaining energy
in the tail of the PDP which is tolerated to interfere with the next symbol (see
Figure 19).
Remaining power
leaking into next
symbol period
Excess delay
Covered by the CP
Figure 19 Channel power delay profile (PDP) and cyclic prefix (CP)
dimensioning
The PDP is dependent on the environment, thus the system must be designed
bearing this in mind. Multipath channel measurements on 900 MHz and 1.7 GHz
done by Telenor R&I in 1990 and 1991 [Løv92] [Ræk95] showed that for urban
areas (downtown Oslo) the delay spread (DS) in 90 % of the cases were below
0.7 μs, which should be well below the chosen CP lengths of E-UTRA and Mobile
WiMAX (approximately 5 and 10 μs, resp). However for different rural
environments, the DS values could be between 5 and 20 μs in 90 % of the
cases. These kinds of environments may be more challenging.
Figure 20 Power spectral density without windowing for 16, 64 and 256 sub-
carriers [Nee00]
Ts = TU + TCP
TCP TU
A variant of localized frequency mapping is shown in Figure 24. In this case, the
sub-carriers are localized in equal size blocks, and resources allocated to one
user consist of one or more block. In this way, the system becomes more
robust to frequency selective fading.
SC de-mapping
NC-point IDFT
+CP, D/A+RF
NC-point DFT
RF+A/D, -CP
SC mapping
Channel
OFDMA
NC NC
N N
SC de-mapping
NC-point IDFT
+CP, D/A+RF
NC-point DFT
RF+A/D, -CP
SC mapping
N-point
N-point
IDFT
DFT
Channel
DFT-spread OFDMA
0
16 QAM 1/2, Red: OFDMA, Blue:IFDMA, FFT size:1024, M=128
10
IFDMA
-1
PER
10
3 dB loss
OFDMA
-2
10
4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24
av. SNR per subcarrier(dB)
-10
-20
-30
-40
-50
-60
-2000 -1500 -1000 -500 0 500 1000 1500 2000
subcarrier
1
Press release from NSN at:
http://www.nokiasiemensnetworks.com/global/Press/Press+releases/news-
archive/Up_to_ten_times_faster_mobile_broadband_data_rates_a_step_closer_to_reality.htm
The multiple access scheme is based on OFDMA for the downlink and SC-FDMA
for the uplink. Cyclic prefix (CP) is used in both directions to protect against
ISI. Both frequency division duplex (FDD) and time division duplex (TDD) are
supported in order to support transmission both in paired and unpaired
spectrum. The bandwidth is scalable from 1.4 to 20 MHz.
The sub-carrier (SC) distance is chosen to be 15 kHz, defining the symbol
length to be 66.67 μs. It is designed to be narrower than the channel coherence
bandwidth so that the fading of each sub-carrier becomes approximately flat,
i.e. frequency non-selective. In this way the frequency domain equalization in
the receiver can consist of only 1 tap per SC. At the same time it needs to be
large enough to minimize ICI due to Doppler effects and phase noise in the
transmitter and receiver.
An additional motivation for this choice was to simplify the implementation of
WCDMA/HSPA/E-UTRA multi-mode terminals [Dahl07]. The sampling rate (fs =
Δf ⋅ NFFT, see Table 2) will be a multiple of the WCDMA/HSPA chip rate of 3.84
MHz.
DL
N symb
Frequency
Resource
block
Resource element:
N scRB
Time
l=0 l = N symb
DL
−1
Figure 32 E-UTRA resource grid defining the physical resource block and
resource elements (Downlink example) [TS 36.211]
Further, two slots form one subframe of 1 ms duration, and 10 subframes (or
20 slots) form one radio frame of 10 ms. This is called a type 1 frame structure
defined for both FDD and TDD operation and is shown in Figure 33. An
alternative frame structure called “type 2” is also defined for TDD operation.
This is defined to optimize co-existence with legacy 1.28 Mchip/s UTRA TDD
systems. It is not treated further here.
Likewise, for the slot structure, two main types exist depending on the choice of
length of the CP. The “mainstream” choice will probably be the normal CP of
5.21/4.69 μs giving 7 symbols in a slot as shown in Figure 34.
In the standard documents, the time unit is often given as an integer number of
Ts = 1/(Δf⋅2048) ≈ 32.55 ns. Looking at Table 2, we see that this is the period
of the sampling frequency of the 20 MHz bandwidth transmission.
Slot: 0.5 ms
CP0 Symb#0 CP1 Symb#1 CP2 Symb#2 CP3 Symb#3 CP4 Symb#4 CP5 Symb#5 CP6 Symb#6
Table 1 Values for slot lengths and cyclic prefix for E-UTRA
Number of w/normal CP 7
symbols per slot w/extended CP 6
Cyclic prefix Normal TCP0 = 5.21 μs (for 1 symbol per slot)
duration TCP1-6 = 4.69 μs (for 6 symbols per slot)
Extended TCP-e = 16.67 μs (for all 6 symbols in a slot)
Unless otherwise noted, we shall focus this description on the use of type 1
radio frames and slot structures with normal CP.
E-UTRA builds on the concept of scalable OFDMA (S-OFDMA), i.e. several
bandwidths are supported. The same flexibility is provided in the SC-FDMA
uplink. The parameters common for downlink and uplink are given in Table 2.
Sampling frequency, 1.92 1.92 3.84 3.84 7.68 15.36 23.04 30.72
(15 000⋅NFFT [MHz])
FFT size, (NFFT) 128 128 256 256 512 1024 1536 2048
* Included for spectrum compatibility with Low Chip Rate (LCR) TDD
[TR 25.913].
Frequency (subcarrier)
Slot = 0.5 ms
Subframe = 1 ms
Figure 36 Uplink reference signals are inserted within the fourth block of each
uplink slot [Dahl07]
2
The presentation of mobile WiMAX is based on [WiMAX06], [Nua07], and [And07].
3
ITU-R press release from RA-07 at: http://www.itu.int/newsroom/press_releases/2007/30.html
while contiguous sub-carrier permutations are well suited for fixed, portable, or
low mobility environments. These options enable the system designer to trade-
off mobility for throughput.
Frequency
P P
Cluster: 14 SC x 2 symbols
P P
Cluster renumbering
Sub-carrier mapping
Figure 40 Detailed example of the DL PUSC permutation technique for a FFT length of 512 (360 active sub-carriers)
Analogous to the cluster structure for DL, a tile structure is defined for the UL
PUSC. The available sub-carrier space is split into tiles (four sub-carriers over 3
symbol periods), which is pseudo randomly gathered into 6 groups. As for DL
PUSC, a new permutation is performed inside each of the groups to form the
sub-channels. The sub-channel comprises 24 sub-carriers. The procedure is
illustrated in Figure 41.
TUSC
PUSC
PUSC
PUSC
FUSC
AMC
AMC
DL
The figure shows that it is only the permutation scheme of the FCH and MAP
information that are predefined; the rest of the frame is flexible.
It is important to note that while Mobile WiMAX has been standardized for a
while, the E-UTRA is still in writing. Consequently, it may seem that E-UTRA has
more options. This may not be the practical situation when equipment starts to
be available. There is a high probability that E-UTRA implementations will be
confined to e.g. a subset of the supported bandwidths, at least from the
beginning. It is also expected that since the basis for Mobile WiMAX, namely the
IEEE 802.16e-2005 standard, contains a wider range of options, more of these
will be part of future releases from the WiMAX Forum.
The OFDM SC spacing for E-UTRA and Mobile WiMAX are 15 kHz and 10.94 kHz,
respectively. From the short discussion in section 2.2.1, we saw that a smaller
SC spacing makes the system more vulnerable to frequency errors, either
caused by mobile radio propagation Doppler effects or by other sources. The
difference is actually quite large and implies that Mobile WiMAX probably is less
robust to high velocity mobility than E-UTRA, but we talk velocities way beyond
100 km/h in any case. This tendency is even strengthened if bandwidths of 7
MHz or 8.75 MHz are chosen, because the sub-carrier distance is even smaller.
E-UTRA and Mobile WiMAX seem to have different approaches to choosing the
appropriate guard time. While Mobile WiMAX has chosen a single value to cover
the targeted scenarios, E-UTRA provides two choices:
• E-UTRA normal CP is 5.21/4.69 μs, covering an excess delay of up to 1.5
km
• Mobile WiMAX CP is 11.4 μs, covering an excess delay of up to 3.4 km
• E-UTRA extended CP is 16.67 μs, covering an excess delay of up to 5 km
The overhead also varies accordingly, and it seems that 3GPP tries to target E-
UTRA for slightly better resource utilization in the normal case, at the expense
of less robustness for long delays, which might occur in rural scenarios. The
option of an extended CP covers this in addition to the broadcast SFN scenario.
Mobile WiMAX, on the other hand, compromises and has chosen a value in
between, basically covering all practical scenarios.
Differences in time and frequency domain are shown in Figure 45.
E-UTRA
Mobile WiMAX
Frequency Time
Figure 45 Sub-carrier distance, useful symbol time and cyclic prefix for E-
UTRA and Mobile WiMAX
In the end, the differences on the physical layer of E-UTRA and Mobile WiMAX
are small, and it is not possible to point out a “winner” based on this.
4
Press release from 3GPP2 at:
http://www.3gpp2.org/Public_html/News/Release_UMBSpecification24SEP2007.pdf
5
See: http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/history.htm
If coverage or Results:
capacity do Coverage • Path loss
not meet • Cell range
requirements
Results:
• Cell capacity
Capacity • Throughput
• Distributions
Done
DL subframe UL subframe
from Nokia Siemens (Figure 54). In this example the interference margin is
proposed at 2 dB for the UL and 3 dB for the DL. Other examples show
variations from 1 – 6 dB [Lam07] [Hag07].
To summarize, the interference margin is dependent on the frequency reuse
strategy employed, and further investigations should be performed before we
can give an accurate recommendation on the interference margin to be utilized
in the radio planning.
Uplink Downlink
Data rate kbps 64,0 Data rate Mbps 1,0
6 Conclusions
In this report we have explained how transmission and multiple access based
on OFDM and OFDMA is designed, with special attention to the Mobile WiMAX
standard and the Evolved UTRA (also known as LTE) standard, both which are
based on Scalable OFDMA.
One major advantage of OFDM is that it can efficiently handle multipath
transmission without complex receivers. A simple one-tap equalized is enough.
This also opens for efficient and simple support of multiple antennas. The use of
Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) techniques is “simple” and cost-efficient. Changing
the FFT size also makes it easily scalable with respect to bandwidth. On the
downside, the OFDM-signal possesses the property of having a high so-called
Peak-to Average Power Ratio (PAPR), which increases with the number of sub-
carriers used, however this is also present in WCDMA on a smaller scale. This is
unfavourable because to ensure linear behaviour a large backoff is needed in
the amplifier. On the base station transmitter, this may not be a major
problem, but on the user terminal transmitter, this implies higher cost and
possibly higher power consumption and shorter battery life.
OFDM used as a multiple access technique, commonly known as OFDMA,
benefits from the scalability in assigning resources to different users in a
flexible manner whether FDD or TDD operation is assumed. Since OFDM utilizes
time- and frequency diversity, channel dependent scheduling is possible.
Main advantages of OFDMA:
• Scalability
• Effective implementation using FFT (favourable for MIMO
implementation)
• Opportunistic frequency scheduling
Main disadvantage of OFDMA
• Larger PAPR
The two major standards for mobile broadband are Mobile WiMAX, based on
IEEE 802.16e, and the Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard from 3GPP, formally
named Evolved UTRA (E-UTRA). There are no major differences between these
two standards on the physical layer. Both are designed for the same range of
bandwidths. The basic design is fairly similar, however details may differ. Based
on slightly different choices of values for the OFDM-parameters we might say
that Mobile WiMAX may have a better performance in “heavy” multipath, since
the symbols and cyclic prefix are longer than for E-UTRA. On the other hand,
this gives smaller sub-carrier distance which puts higher demands on frequency
accuracies and smaller tolerance for Doppler spread in the channel. Mobile
WiMAX uses more resources for pilots or reference signals which at least in
theory should give more robust performance in difficult radio conditions. On the
other hand, it consumes more radio resources and power than E-UTRA, which
can result in loss in efficiency.
Conclusively on Mobile WiMAX vs. E-UTRA, there is no clear winner when it
comes to technical performance. E-UTRA has however the advantage of being
designed for smoother co-existence with and migration from WCDMA/HSPA.
Radio planning OFDMA networks is more equal to GSM planning than WCDMA
planning. In an interference-limited scenario, intra-cell interference is basically
eliminated due to the fact that users are orthogonal to each other in either
time- or frequency domain. This is similar to GSM, where there is orthogonality
in the time-domain within the cell. It is different from WCDMA, where intra-cell
interference on the uplink is a major factor when planning for high capacity.
Main interference is from neighbour cells and the problem is to estimate
reasonable interference margins.
A few examples of link budgets for Mobile WiMAX and E-UTRA show that there
are some differences in the interference margin estimates.
Additionally, Scalable OFDMA opens a few new ideas on frequency reuse
methods. In WCDMA, a frequency reuse factor of 1 (same carrier in all cells) is
often used, but frequency planning with e.g. 3 frequencies are also possible. In
OFDMA it is possible to adjust the frequency reuse factor between 1 and e.g. 3
using fractional frequency reuse which opens up the possibility for dynamic
frequency reuse and also dynamic capacity planning. Dividing each cell in an
inner part using all frequencies (reuse 1) and outer part using 1/3 of the
frequencies (reuse 3) makes it possible to tune the different cell capacities
cooperatively, e.g. by moving capacity from one cell to another dependent on
the time of day.
References
[802.11a] IEEE 802 LAN/MAN Standards Committee. Part 11: Wireless
LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY)
specifications. High-speed Physical Layer in the 5 GHz Band.
IEEE Std 802.11a-1999(R2003). IEEE, NJ, USA, June 2003.
[ECMA-368] Ecma International. High Rate Ultra Wideband PHY and MAC
Standard. ECMA-368, 1st edition. December 2005
[EN 300 744] ETSI. Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB); Framing structure,
channel coding and modulation for digital terrestrial television.
ETSI EN 300 744, V1.5.1, Nov 2004.
[TR 25.814] 3rd Generation Partnership Project. Physical layer aspects for
evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (UTRA) (Release 7).
3GPP TR 25.814, V7.1.0. Sept 2006.
Annex 1. Abbreviations
3GPP 3rd Generation Partnership Project
3GPP2 3rd Generation Partnership Project 2
16-QAM 16-state Quadrature Amplitude Modulation
64-QAM 64-state Quadrature Amplitude Modulation
AAS Advanced Antenna System
ACI Adjacent Channel Interference
AMC Adaptive Modulation and Coding
BER Bit Error Rate
BPSK Binary Phase Shift Keying
CCDF Complementary Cumulative Distribution Function
CCI Co-Channel Interference
CDF Cumulative Distribution Function
COFDM Coded OFDM
CP Cyclic Prefix
CSMA Carrier Sense Multiple Access
DL Downlink
DS Delay Spread
DVB-H Digital Video Broadcast Handheld
DVB-T Digital Video Broadcast Terrestrial
E-UTRA Evolved UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access
FDD Frequency Division Duplex
FDM Frequency Division Multiplex
FDMA Frequency Division Multiple Access
FEC Forward Error Correction
FFT Fast Fourier Transform
FRF Frequency Reuse Factor
FUSC Full Usage of Sub-Carriers
HSPA High Speed Packet Access
ICI Inter Carrier Interference
IEEE Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
ISI Inter Symbol Interference
ITU-R International Telecommunication Union – Radio communications sector
LCR Low Chip Rate
LTE Long Term Evolution
MB-OFDM Multi-Band Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex
MCS Modulation and Coding Schemes
MS Mobile Station
OFDM Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing
OFDMA Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access
PAPR Peak to Average Power Ratio
PDP Power Delay Profile
PUSC Partial Usage of Sub-Carriers
QPSK Quadrature Phase Shift Keying
SC Sub-Carrier
SC-FDMA Single Carrier FDMA
SFN Single Frequency Network
SIR Signal to Interference Ratio
SM Spatial Multiplexing
SNIR Signal to Noise and Interference Ratio
S-OFDMA Scalable OFDMA
STC Space Time Coding