IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 58, NO.
4, MAY 2009
Max-Min Fair Pre-DFT Combining for OFDM
Systems With Multiple Receive Antennas
Yinman Lee, Member, IEEE
Abstract—For orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing
(OFDM) systems equipped with multiple receive antennas,
conventional pre-discrete Fourier transform (DFT) combining
cannot balance the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) performance of
all subcarriers. This degrades the whole system performance. In
this paper, we propose the use of the max-min fair criterion for
pre-DFT combining to solve the problem. Semidefinite relaxation
(SDR) is employed to approximate the solution. We also present
a simple way to effectively reduce the amount of computation
without sacrificing much of the performance. Simulation results
show that, for both uncoded and coded OFDM systems, the
proposed max-min fair pre-DFT combining solved via SDR can
outperform conventional pre-DFT combining under various
multipath channel environments with affordable computational
complexity.
Index Terms—Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing
(OFDM), pre-discrete Fourier transform (DFT) combining,
semidefinite programming, semidefinite relaxation (SDR).
I. I NTRODUCTION
O RTHOGONAL frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM)
is an effective technology for robust and reliable high-rate
transmission in next-generation wireless communication sys-
tems [1]. It transforms a frequency-selective fading channel into
parallel flat-fading subchannels, thereby mitigating the effect of
intersymbol interference and reducing the receiver complexity
in both the equalization and symbol-decoding stages. As a
result, OFDM has recently received much attention in digital
video/audio broadcasting, wireless local area networks (IEEE
802.11a/g/n standards), broadband wireless access (BWA)
(IEEE 802.16e standard, which is also known as WiMAX),
mobile BWA (IEEE 802.20 standard), fourth-generation mobile
communication systems, etc.
It is known that the use of multiple receive antennas
for OFDM signal reception can improve the link quality.
Subcarrier-based maximum ratio combining (MRC) gives ex-
cellent performance; however, it requires high computational
complexity since one discrete Fourier transform (DFT) block
for each receive antenna is needed to fully exploit the advantage
of spatial diversity. In modern OFDM applications, the number
of subcarriers is up to several thousands, as reported in the
Manuscript received January 16, 2008; revised June 11, 2008. First published
August 12, 2008; current version published April 22, 2009. This work was
supported by the National Science Council, Taiwan, under Grant NSC 96-2221-
E-260-003. The review of this paper was coordinated by Dr. Y.-C. Liang.
The author is with the Graduate Institute of Communication Engineer-
ing, National Chi Nan University, Puli 54561, Taiwan (e-mail: ymlee@
ncnu.edu.tw).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TVT.2008.2003445
0018-9545/$25.00 © 2008 IEEE
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1741
latest broadcasting and WiMAX standards, and any additional
DFT block will remarkably increase the computational com-
plexity. Pre-DFT combining was then proposed for complexity
reduction [2]–[5]. Usually, only one DFT block is required.
This saving is very significant, particularly when the number
of receive antennas and the number of subcarriers are large.
Conventional pre-DFT combining is set to maximize the sum
of the output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values achieved in
all subcarriers before detection. For easy reference, we call
this criterion as maximizing the overall output SNR in the
following. The disadvantage of it is that the SNR performance
of different subcarriers is often not balanced. The high error
rate recorded in some subcarriers causes a bottleneck, which
will unavoidably degrade the whole system performance.
In this paper, we propose the use of the max-min fair
criterion, which is nondeterministic polynomial-time hard
(NP-hard) in nature, for pre-DFT combining. Fortunately, this
criterion can be reformulated to allow the application of semi-
definite relaxation (SDR) [6] and, thus, can accurately and
efficiently be approximated in polynomial time [7]. This en-
sures satisfactory SNR performance for the bad subcarriers,
and the total error rate can substantially be improved. To take
one step further, we present a simple way to effectively reduce
the amount of computation without sacrificing much of the
performance. Simulation results show that, for both uncoded
and coded (convolutionally coded with hard-decision decoding)
OFDM systems, the proposed max-min fair pre-DFT combin-
ing solved via SDR can perform better than conventional pre-
DFT combining under various multipath channel environments
with affordable computational complexity.
Throughout this paper, we use bold letters, bold letters with
an overbar, lower case letters, and upper case letters to denote
vectors, matrices, time-domain signals, and frequency-domain
signals, respectively.
II. S YSTEM D ESCRIPTION
We consider an OFDM system with one transmit antenna
and M receive antennas. Define an N × 1 complex signal
vector S(k) = [ S(kN ) S(kN + 1) · · · S(kN + N − 1) ]T
as the kth OFDM data block (in the frequency domain) to be
transmitted, where N is the number of subcarriers. This data
block is first modulated by inverse DFT (IDFT). With matrix
representation, we can write the output of the IDFT (in the time
domain) as
s(k) = [ s(kN ) s(kN + 1) ··· s(kN + N − 1) ]T
= F̄H S(k) (1)
1742
Fig. 1. Block diagram of a simplified OFDM diversity receiver with pre-DFT
combining.
√ F̄ is an N × N DFT matrix with elements [F̄]p,q =
where
√ N ) exp(−j2πpq/N ) for p, q = 0, 1, . . . , N − 1 and j =
(1/
−1. A cyclic prefix (CP) is inserted afterward, and its length
Lcp is chosen to be longer than the maximum length of
the multipath fading channel L. Usually, L ≤ Lcp  N is
assumed. The resultant signal is then upconverted to radio
frequency for transmission. In addition, define an N × 1 vec-
tor hm = [ hm (0) hm (1) · · · hm (L − 1) 0 · · · 0 ]T ,
where hm (l) represents the lth complex channel coefficient
for the mth receive antenna, with 0 ≤ l ≤ L − 1 and 0 ≤ m ≤
M − 1. We suppose that the channel fading is quasi-static, i.e.,
it does not vary within one OFDM data block but can change
from block to block. Collecting all channel vectors from the M
different receive antennas, we construct an N × M channel ma-
trix h̄ = [ h0 h1 · · · hM −1 ] and its frequency response as
H̄ = [ H0 H1 ··· HM −1 ] = F̄h̄
with Hm = F̄hm . In an ordinary OFDM signal reception
process, after frequency downconversion, CP removal, and
DFT demodulation, the resultant N × 1 signal vector in the
frequency domain from the mth receive antenna, which is
denoted by Rm (k), can be shown to be
Rm (k) = diag {S(k)} Hm + Nm (k)
where diag{·} represents a diagonal matrix with the main
diagonal being the included vector, and Nm (k) is an N × 1
complex Gaussian noise vector with zero mean and equal vari-
ance for each element. Similarly, we can collect the M received
signal vectors and form an N × M received signal matrix as
R̄(k) = [ R0 (k) R1 (k) ··· RM −1 (k) ] .
To optimize the detection performance, subcarrier-based MRC
can be used to combine the signals from different receive
antennas [different columns in R̄(k)] for each subcarrier
[each row in R̄(k)]. Since M DFT blocks are required for
processing the M received signal vectors, the computational
complexity will be prohibitively high when both M and N
increase. As an alternative, we consider pre-DFT combining.
Fig. 1 shows the block diagram of a simplified OFDM receiver
performing pre-DFT combining. We see that the combining
operation is achieved in the time domain. Only one DFT block
is necessary in between, and the number of weights needed
to be found is equal to the number of receive antennas. Let
w = [ w0 w1 · · · wM −1 ]T be an M × 1 weight vector
for diversity combining. With reference to (3) and (4), the
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 58, NO. 4, MAY 2009
combining operation and the resultant N × 1 signal vector
ready for detection can be expressed as
Y(k) = R̄(k)w = diag {S(k)} H̄w + N̄(k)w (5)
with N̄(k) = [ N0 (k) N1 (k) · · · NM −1 (k) ]. In the
preceding equation, H̄w and N̄(k)w are the effective channel
and the effective noise, respectively, after diversity combining.
Conventional pre-DFT combining is based on maximizing the
overall output SNR of the transmitted OFDM data block S(k).
In that case, the optimum choice for w can be shown to be
the eigenvector corresponding to the maximum eigenvalue of
H̄H H̄ [2].
Usually, the data modulated on all subcarriers are equally
important. One possible problem of conventional pre-DFT
combining is that the improvement of the overall output
SNR is often at the cost of sacrificing the performance of
some subcarriers, which is surely not desirable for signal
detection in uncoded systems. In addition, in coded OFDM
systems, this increases the load of error control coding, and
the whole system performance will still be limited by the
bad subcarriers. To compensate for the degradation, very low
code-rate error control codes should be employed, and the
bandwidth efficiency is unavoidably reduced.
III. P ROPOSED M AX -M IN F AIR P RE -DFT C OMBINING
(2)
To remedy the issue of unbalanced performance among
different subcarriers in pre-DFT combining, we propose the use
of the max-min fair criterion. We define a 1 × M vector γn as
the nth row of the channel matrix H̄ given in (2), with 0 ≤ n ≤
N − 1. With the max-min fair criterion, the optimization of w
can be described as
max min |γn w|2 , subject to wH w = 1 (6)
(3) w n
where |γn w|2 indicates the signal power of the nth subcarrier
after diversity combining. The idea behind this criterion is
to optimize the SNR performance of the worst subcarrier. It
essentially rectifies the fairness problem in conventional pre-
DFT combining. In this way, the signal strength of the worst
subcarrier will not be too low in most circumstances. The SNR
loss in the bad subcarriers will be reduced, and thus, the perfor-
(4) mance bottleneck for OFDM systems will be removed. On the
one hand, it is intuitively true that the max-min fair criterion is
an appropriate objective for uncoded OFDM systems. On the
other hand, we will empirically show in Section V that this
criterion can also enhance the error-probability performance
when coding and interleaving are employed across the whole
OFDM data block for error protection.
Unfortunately, this max-min fair criterion is known to be
NP-hard. Inspired by [6], we can recast the optimization prob-
lem in (6) as
max min trace(Γn W)
W n
subject to trace(W) = 1 rank(W) = 1, W  0 (7)
where Γn = γnH γn , W is an M × M matrix to be deter-
mined, and the inequality W  0 means that W is symmetric
LEE: MAX-MIN FAIR PRE-DFT COMBINING FOR OFDM SYSTEMS WITH MULTIPLE RECEIVE ANTENNAS
positive semidefinite. Instead of directly solving the NP-hard
max-min problem, we seek an approximation of the solution.
By dropping the nonconvex rank-one constraint in (7), the
max-min fair criterion can be relaxed to
max min trace (Γn W)
W n
subject to trace (W) = 1, W  0.
Let z be a scalar. This relaxation is equivalent to
max z
W
subject to trace(Γn W) ≥ z trace(W) = 1, W0
(9)
which is convex in structure. With W  0, it is not difficult
to see that (9) can be categorized to be a semidefinite pro-
gramming problem. Thus, the optimal choice of W, i.e., Wopt ,
can systematically be obtained using the efficient interior point
method [7]. In the following, we use the SeDuMi convex opti-
mization MATLAB toolbox [8] to find the solution of (9). Note
that the resultant Wopt will not be of rank one in general. The
remaining problem is generating a weight vector from Wopt
by approaching the task of the original max-min fair criterion
given in (6). A randomization step is then required, and the
best weight vector w fulfilling Wopt = wwH will be selected
as the approximated solution. For instance, we may calculate
the eigenvalue decomposition of Wopt (Wopt = UΣUH ) and
let w = UΣ1/2 e, where e is an N × 1 random vector. Its
nth element [e]n can be set to be exp(jθn ), where θn is
independent and uniformly distributed over [0, 2π). Among all
the randomly generated weight vectors, we select that with the
largest min |γ n w|2 as the best choice for the weight vector,
which essentially comes close to the underlying aim of (6).
IV. C OMPLEXITY R EDUCTION
In this section, we derive the computational complexity of
the considered combining schemes and propose a method to
reduce the complexity of obtaining the weights for our max-
min fair pre-DFT combining. According to [5], if we ignore the
calculation of the pre-DFT combining weights,1 the computa-
tional complexity of conventional pre-DFT combining will be
on the order of O(N log2 N + M N ), and that of subcarrier-
based MRC will be on the order of O(M N log2 N + M N ).
When log2 N  M , the complexity of the pre-DFT approach
is roughly M times less than that of the subcarrier-based
approach. Note that the proposed max-min fair pre-DFT com-
bining also enjoys this merit. However, from (9), we see that
its weight calculation may be much involved, as compared with
that required for conventional pre-DFT combining. Specifically,
to obtain the conventional pre-DFT combining weights, the
complexity is on the order of O(M 2 N + M 3 ), which includes
the calculation of H̄H H̄ and the corresponding eigenanalysis
[9]. For the SDR problem given in (9), we observe that the
1 When the multipath channels do not vary, the weight calculation is only
required to be performed once. Its complexity is proportional to the number
of receive antennas, which is much smaller than the number of subcarriers in
a typical OFDM system. As a consequence, the induced complexity can be
ignored in the combining process.
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1743
TABLE I
COMPLEXITY RATIO OF MAX-MIN FAIR PRE-DFT COMBINING
SOLVED VIA SDR TO CONVENTIONAL PRE-DFT COMBINING
(O(M 2 Nu + M 2.5 Nu2 )/O(M 2 N + M 3 )) WITH M = 4
(8)
number of constraints is N + 1 and that the dimension of
the resultant weights is M . The preparation for Γn requires
calculation on the order of O(M 2 N ). In addition, it can be
shown that the computational complexity of the primal problem
and the dual problem of (9) solved by the interior point method
is mainly on the order of O(M 4 N 2.5 ) and O(M 2.5 N 2 ), respec-
tively [7]. Therefore, the complexity may be prohibitively high
for typical values of M and N . Also note that the complexity
of the randomization step can be ignored, as compared with the
complexity of the SDR calculation. In the following, we present
a simple way to effectively reduce the amount of computation
for obtaining these combining weights.
For OFDM systems, it is well understood that the fading
effect over adjacent subcarriers can be quite similar, particularly
when the length of the multipath channel is not large (or,
equivalently, the frequency-selective fading phenomenon is not
severe). Under this premise, we find that it is unnecessary to
adopt the channel conditions from all N subcarriers, i.e., Γn in
(9), for calculating the weights of the proposed max-min fair
pre-DFT combining. That is, we can reduce the value of N
when solving the SDR problem. Let the number of the actual
selected subcarriers for weight calculation be Nu . An intuitive
way for selecting the subcarriers is to pick them in an inter-
leaved manner. This way, one subcarrier is selected for every
N/Nu subcarriers. Table I lists the resultant complexity ratio of
the proposed max-min fair pre-DFT combining solved via SDR
to conventional pre-DFT combining, in which the number of
receive antennas is set as M = 4. Note that the dual form of (9)
is used for solving the SDR problem with lower complexity.
We see that, by using Nu , instead of N , the computation
load of the SDR problem becomes reasonable and acceptable
for pre-DFT combining. In some cases (which are printed in
bold form in the table), its complexity is even lower than that
required for conventional pre-DFT combining. Certainly, there
is a tradeoff between performance and complexity. The smaller
the Nu , the less the computational complexity, but the more the
performance degrades. In the next section, we will empirically
show that the performance loss due to the use of just a small
portion of the subcarriers for approximating the max-min fair
solution is not large.
V. S IMULATION R ESULT
Computer simulations are conducted to demonstrate the
effectiveness of the proposed max-min fair criterion solved
via SDR for pre-DFT combining. Here, four receive antennas
(M = 4) are used for OFDM systems with quadrature phase-
shift keying signaling. In addition, the number of subcarriers is
1744
Fig. 2. Uncoded BER performance for different combining schemes with
channel length L = 2.
Fig. 3. Coded BER performance for different combining schemes with
channel length L = 2.
set as N = 64, and the length of CP is set as Lcp = 16. The
multipath channels for different receive antennas and the corre-
sponding channel coefficients are all independently generated
according to Rayleigh fading. We examine the performance of
both the uncoded and coded systems. For the coded OFDM,
a convolutional code with code rate 2/3 is used for error
protection. A random interleaver is applied to the whole OFDM
data block. At the receiver, the Viterbi algorithm with hard
decision and a constraint length of 8 is used for decoding. To
gain much insight into the tradeoff between performance and
complexity for the proposed max-min via SDR, we evaluate
its performance with different values of Nu in the follow-
ing. For comparison, we also consider the detection with a
single receive antenna, conventional pre-DFT combining, and
subcarrier-based MRC with the same settings.
Figs. 2 and 3 show the bit error rate (BER) performance
for the uncoded and coded OFDM systems, respectively. The
length of the multipath channels in these cases is L = 2. From
these two figures, we see that there is always some improvement
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 58, NO. 4, MAY 2009
Fig. 4. Uncoded BER performance for different combining schemes with
channel length L = 6.
Fig. 5. Coded BER performance for different combining schemes with
channel length L = 6.
in BER while utilizing multiple receive antennas. Subcarrier-
based MRC gives the best performance at the expense of higher
computational complexity, and the proposed max-min via SDR
significantly outperforms conventional pre-DFT combining
from moderate- to high-SNR regions in both cases. The BER
performance of the proposed max-min via SDR with Nu =
N = 64 can be quite close to that of subcarrier-based MRC. As
the value of Nu decreases, the BER of the proposed max-min
via SDR increases. We observe that, when Nu is equal to 16
or 8, the performance loss is negligibly small. Moreover, even
with Nu = 2, i.e., only two subcarriers are used for the SDR
calculation, its BER performance is still better than that of con-
ventional pre-DFT combining when the SNR is larger than 0 dB
for the uncoded case and larger than 6 dB for the coded case.
After that, we repeat the same experiment for the scenario
of longer channel length, i.e., L = 6. The BER performance
is shown in Figs. 4 and 5 for the uncoded and coded systems,
respectively. We observe the same trend in the figures. Although
the performance gap between the max-min via SDR and the
LEE: MAX-MIN FAIR PRE-DFT COMBINING FOR OFDM SYSTEMS WITH MULTIPLE RECEIVE ANTENNAS
subcarrier-based MRC becomes larger, the proposed scheme
still quite significantly outperforms conventional pre-DFT com-
bining, particularly under the high-SNR region. All these show
the effectiveness of the max-min fair criterion for use in pre-
DFT combining for both uncoded and coded OFDM systems.
VI. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, we have developed the max-min fair criterion
for pre-DFT combining. The max-min solution is approxi-
mated through SDR and solved with affordable computational
complexity. Based on extensive simulations, we conclude that
the proposed max-min via SDR scheme can improve the
error-probability performance of pre-DFT combining and pro-
vide a good tradeoff between performance and computational
complexity.
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Yinman Lee (M’06) was born in Hong Kong. He
received the Ph.D. degree from the Department of
Communication Engineering, National Chiao Tung
University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, in 2006.
Since 2006, he has been with the Graduate
Institute of Communication Engineering, National
Chi Nan University, Puli, Taiwan, as an Assistant
Professor. His research interests include adaptive sig-
nal processing, wireless communications, and multi-
ple antenna systems.