Practical BER-Based Estimation of Residual OFDM CFO by Reducing Noise Margin

Abstract

The main OFDM drawbacks are Carrier Frequency Offset (CFO) and large Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR), which both degrade the Bit Error Rate (BER). Specifically, we consider here clipping or any other PAPR reduction method sufficient to prevent the nonlinear high-power amplifier from generating errors. Moreover, in small cells, the signal-to-noise ratio is large, while the small time dispersion allows the OFDM symbol cyclic prefix to prevent intersymbol interference. This retains the CFO to solely determine the BER and vice versa, enabling indirect estimation of CFO-induced phase distortion by simple BER testing. However, a particular problem is measuring very low BER values (generated by alike residual CFO), which could last a long time in order to acquire statistically enough errors. The test time can be drastically reduced if the noise margin is reduced in a controllable way, by adding the interfering signal to each subcarrier at the receiver. This approach is shown to enable efficient and accurate short-term BER (and so CFO phase error) testing.