Reduced-complexity SFBC-OFDM for vehicular channels with high mobility

Space frequency block coding with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (SFBC-OFDM) suffers from the effect of inter-carrier interference (ICI) in doubly-selective communication channels. In this paper, a scheme is proposed in which windowing is applied to the received signal to reduce the effect of ICI to a limited number of neighboring sub-carriers. The sub-carriers holding the SFBC components of each codeword are separated by a number of sub-carriers larger than the ICI range, and hence, they do not interfere with each other. In order to preserve the structure of the SFBC, the separation between the codeword components is also selected within the coherence bandwidth of the channel. As a result, the diversity gain of the SFBC is preserved. A decision feedback equalizer is proposed to estimate the transmitted data symbols with low complexity. Simulation results are presented showing the ability of the proposed scheme to significantly improve the performance of SFBC-OFDM and preserve its diversity gain. © 2012 IEEE.