Cyclic prefix

Cyclic prefix
In telecommunications, the term cyclic prefix refers to the prefixing of a symbol with a repetition of the end.
Although the receiver is typically configured to discard the cyclic prefix samples, the cyclic prefix serves two
purposes.
As a guard interval, it eliminates the intersymbol interference from the previous symbol.
As a repetition of the end of the symbol, it allows the linear convolution of a frequency-selective multipath
channel to be modelled as circular convolution, which in turn may be transformed to the frequency domain using
a discrete Fourier transform. This approach allows for simple frequency-domain processing, such as channel
estimation and equalization.
In order for the cyclic prefix to be effective (i.e. to serve its aforementioned objectives), the length of the cyclic
prefix must be at least equal to the length of the multipath channel. Although the concept of cyclic prefix has been
traditionally associated with OFDM systems, the cyclic prefix is now also used in single carrier systems to improve
the robustness to multipath propagation.

Principle
Cyclic prefix is often used in conjunction with modulation in order to retain sinusoids' properties in multipath
channels. It is well known that sinusoidal signals are eigenfunctions of linear, and time-invariant systems. Therefore,
if the channel is assumed to be linear and time-invariant, then a sinusoid of infinite duration would be an
eigenfunction. However, in practice, this cannot be achieved, as real signals are always time-limited. So, to mimic
the infinite behavior, prefixing the end of the symbol to the beginning makes the linear convolution of the channel
appear as though it were circular convolution, and thus, preserve this property in the part of the symbol after the
cyclic prefix.

Use in OFDM
Cyclic Prefixes are used in OFDM in order to combat multipath by making channel estimation easy. As an example,
consider an OFDM system which has
subcarriers.[1] The message symbol can be written as:

The OFDM symbol is constructed by taking the inverse discrete Fourier transform (IDFT) of the message symbol,
followed by a cyclic prefixing. Let the symbol obtained by the IDFT be denoted by
.
Prefixing it with a cyclic prefix of length

, the OFDM symbol obtained is:

.

Assume that the channel is represented using

.
Then, after convolution with the channel, which happens as

which is circular convolution, as

becomes

. So, taking the Discrete Fourier

Transform, we get
.
where

is the discrete Fourier transform of

. Thus, a multipath channel is converted into scalar parallel

sub-channels in frequency domain, thereby simplifying the receiver design considerably. The task of channel

Cyclic prefix

estimation is simplified, as we just need to estimate the scalar coefficients

of

for each sub-channel and once the values

are estimated, for the duration in which the channel does not vary significantly, merely multiplying the received

demodulated symbols by the inverse of

yields the estimates of

and hence, the estimate of actual symbols

References
[1] http:/ / www. create. ucsb. edu/ ATON/ 01. 01/ OFDM. pdf

Fundamentals of Wireless Communication (http://www.ifp.uiuc.edu/~pramodv/book.html), by David Tse

and Pramod Viswanath, Cambridge University Press (2005).
A short tutorial on the significance of cyclic prefix in OFDM systems (http://sites.google.com/site/
mdanishnisar/pubs/01_OFDM_Tutorial_Nisar.pdf).

Article Sources and Contributors

Article Sources and Contributors

Cyclic prefix Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=579654648 Contributors: BD2412, BradBeattie, Brandon, Bucketsofg, Dogaroon, Elmsfu, Georgios Nikolaidis, Glenn,
InvisibleK, Kumar Appaiah, Mange01, Mel aad, NigelKing, Oli Filth, R'n'B, Wiki contributor 21, 32 anonymous edits

License
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/