Intercarrier Interference in OFDM: a Deterministic Model for Transmissions in Mobile Environments with Imperfect Synchronization

Abstract

Intercarrier Interference (ICI) is an impairment well known to degrade performance of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) transmissions. It arises from carrier frequency offsets (CFO), from the Doppler spread due to channel time-variation, and, to a lesser extent, from sampling frequency offsets (SFO).

The literature reports several models of ICI due to each kind of impairment. Some studies describe ICI due to two of the three impairments, but so far no general model exists to describe the joint effect of all three impairments together. Furthermore, most available models involve some level of approximation, and the diversity of approaches makes it cumbersome to compare power levels of the different kinds of ICI.

In this work, we present the derivation of a general and mathematically exact model for the ICI stemming from the joint effect of the three impairments mentioned.