1

AbstractN-continuous has been proved to be an effective

and simple way in reducing the out-of-band power radiation
of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)
signals. However, it achieves sidelobes reduction at the cost of
additional distortion to data signals and requires iterative
processing to reverse the transmitter processing. In this
paper, a novel iterative receiver is proposed to estimate and
cancel the distortion caused by N-continuous processing. The
proposed method is applied to multi-input multi-output
(MIMO) OFDM signals whose sidelobes are reduced by
N-continuous processing. It is shown by simulation that the
bit error rate (BER) performance of MIMO OFDM system
will be greatly improved with moderate complexity increase.
Keywords-iterative method; N-continuous distortion;
multi-input multi-output (MIMO); orthogonal frequency
division multiplexing (OFDM)
I. INTRODUCTION
OFDM is a popular modulation technique with many
desirable qualities and has been proposed for the IEEE
802.11a, IEEE 802.11g, IEEE 802.16, the European digital
audio broadcasting (DAB), and the European digital video
broadcasting (DVB) standards. However, its relatively
slow spectrum band-edge decay has always been a major
concern, in both wireless and wireline applications.
Many sidelobes suppression methods [3]-[8] have been
proposed to address this issue. All of these methods aim to
directly reduce out-of-band power. Most of them set up an
optimal model with the object function of sidelobes
suppression. Unlike the various techniques mentioned
above, reference [1] proposes a new method that indirectly
obtains a huge reduction of out-of-band power by keeping
N derivatives of consecutive OFDM symbols continuous at
the border point in time domain, which is referred to as
N-continuous in literature.
So far, few schemes for mitigating N-continuous
distortion have been reported. [1] proposed an iterative
method to mitigate the effect of N-continuous distortion by
reversing the transmitter processing in OFDM system.
However, this method doesnt work when it is directly
applied to MIMO OFDM system due to the fact that
N-continuous processing inevitably changes the
orthogonal nature of MIMO signals and thus its detection
rules for recovering signals. To avoid complex analysis of
reforming the detection rules, this paper proposes an
algorithm in which the estimation and cancellation of
N-continuous distortion are done by taking advantage of
the received signal and processing it as transmitter does.
As we shall see, unlike additive white Gaussian noise,
N-continuous distortion is kind of mapping of input data
and it is generated by a process known for both transmitter
and receiver. So this distortion can be recreated at the
receiver and subsequently removed, if original data of
transmitter is available. Based on this observation and the
analysis of the N-continuous process, a novel iterative
N-continuous distortion canceller is proposed for MIMO
OFDM signals with N-continuous processing. In each
iteration, the received signals are taken as the ideal
distortion-free signals to generate the N-continuous
distortion just as the transmitter does. Our simulation
shows that this N-continuous distortion can be gradually
approximated without distortion spread. This is due to the
fact that the N-continuous distortion orthogonal nature of
MIMO OFDM system and Euclidean distance between the
modulated QAM/PSK signals are larger than the
N-continuous distortion level, thus making the estimation
of original data signals more reliable in every iteration and
the N-continuous distortion correspondingly more
accurate.
This paper is organized as follows: Section II
demonstrates the N-continuity criteria in single input
single output (SISO) system, and extends this approach to
multi-input multi-output scenario. Then simulation results
are presented in Section III, followed by the conclusions
drawn in section IV.
II. TRANSMISSION OF N-CONTINUOUS SIGNALS
In this section, the conventional N-continuous OFDM
in single input single output (SISO) is at first reviewed, and
then we extend this approach from SISO to multi-input
multi-output (MIMO) systems and propose a novel
detection algorithm to remove N-continuous distortion by
iteratively repeating the transmitter processing, estimating
the distortion and cancelling it.
A. N-continuous OFDM Approach in SISO System
Generally, the baseband OFDM signal is of the form
Iterative Estimation and Cancellation of
N-continuous Distortion for MIMO OFDM
Systems
Qihui Liang, Yue Xiao, Xu He, Shaoqian Li
National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Communication
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
Chengdu, 610054, P. R. China
Email: {haikoulqh, xiaoyue, hexu, lsq}@uestc.edu.cn
978-1-4244-7555-1/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE
2

0
( ) ( ( )),
i s g
i
s t s t i T T
+
=
= +

(1)
where the ith OFDM symbol ( )
i
s t is the weighted sum of
OFDM subcarriers indexed by { }
0 1 1
, , ,
K
k k k k

=

2
,
( ) , .
s
k
j t
T
i k i g s
k
s t d e T t T

= <

(2)
To keep transmitted signals N-continuous means to
have consecutive OFDM symbols and their first N
derivatives continuous at the border point in the time
domain, i.e. ,

1
( ) ( ) ,
g s
n n
i i n n
t T t T
d d
s t s t
dt dt

= =
= (3)
for all 1 i and for 0,1, , n N = , see [1].
Substituting (2) into (3), we have

, , 1
,
n j k n
k i k i
k k
k e d k d

=

(4)
where 2
g
s
T
T
= .
Rewriting (4) in matrix form, then (4) becomes

1
.
i i
= Ad Ad (5)
where and A are two constants, and s jth diagonal
element or A s jth column corresponds to the information
on
j
k th subcarrier. Their matrix form is given as:
0 1 1
( , , , )
K
j k j k j k
diag e e e


= and

0 1 1
0 1 1
1 1 1
.
K
N N N
K
k k k
k k k

=




A

(6)
Assuming OFDM transmitted signal
i
d is only
different from original data signal
i
d by a smallest
correction vector
i
w , i.e.,
i i i
= + d d w , then solving for (5)
results in

1
( ) ,
H
i i i
= + d I P d P d (7)
where
( )
1
H H H

= P A AA A is a constant determined
by the derivatives order and the relevant location of data
subcarriers.
At the receiver, assume the signal after DFT and
equalization is
i
r , then its distortion is removed by taking
advantage of the Euclidean distance between PSK/QAM
constellation points. To be specific, N-continuous
distortion within
i
r is at first estimated and removed, i.e.,
( )
( ) ( 1) j j
i i i

= + r I P r Pd

(8)
for the jth iteration, where I is unitary matrix. And this
estimation may not be exact, so the rule for detector is by
choosing the nearest constellation point to input signal and
output the point value on a per-subcarrier basis

{ }
2
( ) ( )
, ,

arg min .
j j
i k i k
d C
d

= d r (9)
The whole SISO system with N-continuous processing
and de-processing is shown in Fig. 1.
i
d
1 i
d i
w
i
r
i
r
( ) j
i
r
( )

j
i
d
( 1)

j
i

d

Fig. 1. Block diagram of transmitter (top) and receiver (bottom) with
N-continuous processing in SISO systems
B. Extension of N-continuous Method to MIMO Scenario
Reference [1] proposed a detection method in simple
input simple output scenario. However, this detection
method cannot directly applied to MIMO scenario, such as
in the space time block coding (STBC) scheme [3], and we
demonstrated this in matlab simulation. Observing that
N-continuous distortion is the key factor affecting the
STBC decoding performance, we remove the
N-continuous distortion in each branch of MIMO systems
by an iterative estimation and cancellation of N-continuous
distortion in MIMO systems. The block diagrams of
STBC+N-continuous transmitter and receiver are depicted
in Fig. 2 and Fig. 3.



Fig. 2. Block diagram of STBC+N-continuous transmitter

,1

i
D
,

i P
D
,1

i
W
,

i P
W
i
G

i
Y

Fig. 3. Block diagram of STBC+N-continuous receiver with iterative
distortion cancellation
Assume there are P transmitting antennas and Q
receiving antennas. At the receiver side, all the received
signals on every antenna are equally combined with power
normalization and passing to Discrete Fourier Transform
(DFT) module and STBC decoder to obtain the frequency
domain samples on the pth antenna and kth subcarirrer
3

( )
, , , , ,
0, , 1,
k p k p k p k p k p
Y H D W Z k M = + + = (10)
where 1, , p P = ,
, k p
D is the signal after N-continuous
processing in the pth antenna,
, k p
W is the corresponding
N-continuous distortion,
, k p
H is the complex channel gain
of the kth subcarrier assumed to be perfectly known, and
, k p
Z is AWGN.
The main idea of the proposed N-continuous distortion
cancellation scheme is to recreate the N-continuous
process at the receiver using detected symbols, then
estimate and cancel the frequency domain N-continuous
distortion caused by it. The receiver works in an iterative
fashion as described below with reference to Fig. 3.
a) Channel observations
{ }
1
,
0
M
k p
k
Y

=
on the pth
antenna are decoded and detected. Let decisions of the
transmitted sequence be denoted
{ }
1
,
0

M
k p
k
D

=
.
b) The sequence
{ }
1
,
0

M
k p
k
D

=
is then processed
through two branches. One branch regenerated the
frequency domain samples of the signals without
N-continuous processing. The other branch regenerated the
signals at the receiver after N-continuous processing by
passing
{ }
1
,
0

M
k p
k
D

=
through the same STBC encoding and
N-continuous process as at the transmitter. Denote
regenerated samples after N-continuous processing by
{ }
1
,
0
M
k p
k
G

=
, these signals after N-continuous processing can
be represented as the sum of
{ }
1
,
0

M
k p
k
D

=
and the
N-continuous distortion
{ }
1
,
0

M
k p
k
W

=
,

, , ,

, 0, , 1.
k p k p k p
G D W k M = + = (11)
Since
, k p
G and
,

k p
D are observable, the N-continuous
distortion can be estimated as

, , ,

, 0, , 1
k p k p k p
W G D k M = = (12)
c) The estimated N-continuous terms
,

k p
W are
subtracted from the current channel observation to obtain
the refined chancel observation for the next iteration

( )
, , , ,
, , , , , ,

0, , 1

,
k p k p k p k p
k p k p k p k p k p k p
Y Y H W k M
H D H W W Z
= =
= + +

(13)
where
( ) , ,

k p k p
W W is the residual N-continuous
distortion.
d) Go back to step a) and replace
{ }
1
,
0
M
k p
k
Y

=
with
{ }
1
,
0

.
M
k p
k
Y

=

The whole loop (a)-(d) continues for a few iterations. It
is worth noting that as the iterative proceeds, no FFT/IFFT
operations are required.
III. SIMULATION RESULTS
In this section, the bit error rate (BER) performance of
the STBC+N-continuous OFDM signals is given.
All the simulation below is based on OFDM system
employing 16-QAM modulation with K=256 data
subcarriers For the initial OFDM symbol at i=0 we
choose
0
= d 0 . We sample the signal with a sample period
of T
samp
= T
s
/2048 = T
g
/144, where T
s
=1/15 ms, M=2048 is
the length of OFDM signal after oversampling and 144 is
the length of cyclic prefix [9]. In the STBC coding and
decoding scheme, 2 transmitting antennas and 1 receiving
antenna are considered.
As it is shown in Fig. 4, the BER performance of
STBC+N-continuous system with only one time
estimation and cancellation of N-continuous distortion is
greatly improved. Although the increase of derivative
orders from 0 to 3 will further reduce the out-of-band
power of transmitted signals which is an important
specification in OFDM system and in cognitive radio, it
causes degradation of BER performance. Luckily, this
degradation is limited. And we can make a better tradeoff
between the out-of-band power of transmitted signals and
BER performance of the whole system by specifying the
derivative order of N-continuous for practical purpose.
0 5 10 15 20 25 30
SNR(dB)
10
-3
10
-2
10
-1
10
0
N=0, distortion removing
N=3, distortion removing
N=0, STBC decoding
N=3, STBC decoding

Fig. 4. BER performance of STBC+N-continuous system with iterative
estimation and cancellation of N-continuous distortion
IV. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we extend the use of N-continuous
approach from SISO to MIMO system, and propose a
detection method by removing the distortion caused by
N-continuous. The basic idea is to repeat the transmitter
processing and iteratively estimate the N-continuous
distortion. It is demonstrated by simulation that this
iterative estimation of N-continuous distortion is useful to
greatly improve the BER performance.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This work was supported in part by International Sci. &
Tech. Cooperation Project of Ministry of Sci. &Tech. of
4
China under Grant 2008DFA11700, National Defense
Basic Research Program under Grant A1420080150, and
the National Science Foundation of China under Grant
number 60902026.
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