Enhanced diversity scheme for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing systems over doubly selective fading channels

Frequency-time selective fading degrades the performance of communication systems, but it also provides an opportunity to collect multipath diversity and Doppler diversity. In this paper, an oversampled grouped-linear-constellation-precoding (GLCP) scheme is proposed for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems to extract the diversity inherent in doubly selective fading channels. In the proposed scheme, GLCP is employed to precode the information symbols of OFDM at the transmitter, and the precoded OFDM symbols are oversampled in the time domain at the receiver. A full-groups maximum likelihood (ML) decoder and a successive group decoder to decode the oversampled OFDM symbols with diversity gains are developed. The successive group decoder combines the group ML decoding algorithm with a block-decision-feedback-equalization (BDFE) algorithm. The proposed scheme can take advantage of both the GLCP scheme and the oversampling scheme to achieve multipath diversity gains and Doppler diversity gains in doubly selective fading channels. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can significantly improve the performance of OFDM systems in the frequency selective fading channel and the doubly selective fading channel in terms of bit error ratio, indicating that the diversity gains can be greatly enhanced by the proposed scheme in doubly selective fading channels.