Performance Analysis of Hermite-Symmetric Subcarrier Coding for OFDM Systems over Fading Channels

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has great advantages such as high spectrum efficiency and robustness against multipath fading. In order to enhance the advantages, an Hermitesymmetric subcarrier coding for OFDM, which is used for transmission systems like the asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) and multiband OFDM in ultra-wideband (UWB) communications, is very attractive. The subcarrier coding can force the imaginary part of the OFDM signal to be zero, then another data sequence can be simultaneously transmitted in the quadrature channel. In order to theoretically verify the effectiveness of the Hermite-symmetric subcarrier coding in wireless OFDM (HC-OFDM) systems, we derive closed-form equations for bit error rate (BER) and throughput over fading channels. Our analytical results can theoretically indicate that the HC-OFDM systems achieve the improvement of the performances owing to the effect of the subcarrier coding. key words: OFDM, Hermite-symmetric coding, maximum ratio combining, frequency correlation, closed-form equation