Comparative Study of OFDM Implementation Platforms

Comparative Study of OFDM Implementation Platforms
Examiner Prof. H. F. Ragae
Technical Report Ahmed Saeed

November 20, 2010
Faculty of Engineering Electronics Engineering & Electrical Comm. Department
Contents
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Introduction. History and development of OFDM. OFDM Transceiver. COFDM Transceiver. Advantages of OFDM System. Disadvantages of OFDM System. OFDM System Design Requirements. OFDM System Design Parameters. OFDM System Implementation. FPGA ASIC DSP Hybrid platform Conclusion References
Comparative Study of OFDM Implementation Platforms 2
Introduction
Wireless communication has gained a momentum in the last decade of 2th century by 2G.
The primary services of 2G were all voice transmission.
The explosive demand for communication systems of all types of services - voice, data and video
justifies the need for a communications system that utilizes the available bandwidth efficiently and provides high data rates.
3G wireless systems, it is expected that higher mobility with reasonable data rate [1].
Introduction
As the first 4G, WiMAX has the potential to do for broadband what the cell phone did for voice.
It combines the performance of Wi-Fi with the QoS of a cellular technology.
LTE technologies designed to increase the capacity and speed of mobile telephone networks [2].
OFDM & MIMO have emerged as the technologies of choice to satisfy this growth, for WiMAX & LTE as well as Wi-Fi [2].
Introduction
OFDM is a FDM scheme utilized as a digital multi-carrier modulation method. A large number of closely-spaced orthogonal sub-carriers are used to carry data. The data is divided into several parallel data streams or channels, one for each sub-carrier.
Analogy Courtesy: www.complextoreal.com

Introduction
Typically the subcarriers are selected such that they are all orthogonal to one another.
To eliminates the interference [3,4, 7].
The operation of converting the data from serial to parallel then modulate each subcarrier by this data is similar to IFFT.
pipelined streaming algorithm has a minimum transform time among all the FFT libraries [19].
Both FFT & IFFT will produce the same result. BUT, using IFFT is more satisfying because we are producing a time domain signal. The data rate on each of the subchannels is much less than the total data rate.
History and development of OFDM

OFDM has a long history of existence [1]. It is reported that OFDM based systems were in existence during the Second World War.
OFDM had been used by US military in several high frequency military systems such as KINEPLEX, ANDEFT and KATHRYN.
In December 1966, Robert W. Chang outlined a theoretical way to transmit simultaneous data stream trough band limited channel without ISI and ICI. Subsequently, he obtained the first US patent on OFDM in 1970.
History and development of OFDM

A major breakthrough in the history of OFDM came in 1971
Weinstein and Ebert used DFT to perform baseband modulation and demodulation. This eliminated the need for bank of subcarrier oscillators, more useful and efficient implementation of the system.
By the time, inclusion of FFT in OFDM system made it an important part of telecommunications landscape.
DAB was the first commercial use of OFDM technology. At the dawn of the 20th century, several WLAN standards adopted OFDM on their physical layers.
OFDM Transceiver
As mentioned before (as, for example, in [7]) the IFFT of magnitude N realizes an OFDM signal, each symbol is transmitted on one of the N orthogonal frequencies. The input data stream is modulated by a QAM modulator, resulting in a complex symbol stream X[0],X[1], . . .,X[N 1]. This symbol stream is passed through a serial-to-parallel converter. Every symbol transmitted over one of the subcarriers [7]. In order to generate s(t), these frequency components are converted into time samples by performing an IFFT . The IFFT yields:
OFDM Transceiver
Basic block diagram of an OFDM System [7].

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OFDM Transceiver
Then, cyclic prefix is then added to the OFDM symbol, and the resulting time samples are ordered by the parallel-to-serial converter and passed through a D/A converter, resulting in the baseband OFDM signal , which is then up converted to frequency fo [7]. Experiences show that basic OFDM system is not able to obtain a BER of 105 or 106 without channel coding. Thus, all OFDM systems now-a-days are converted to Coded-OFDM (COFDM).
The benefits of COFDM [5]. the channel coding brings the robustness to burst error. the interleaver ensures that adjacent outputs from channel encoder are placed far apart in frequency domain.
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COFDM Transceiver
Block diagram of COFDM System [6].

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Advantages of OFDM
The OFDM System has the following Advantages [1]:
Combating ISI and Reducing ICI CP helps to maintain orthogonality between the sub carriers. Spectral Efficiency as result of orthogonality, the subcarriers can be overlapped in frequency domain. The beauty of OFDM lies in its simplicity. In a relatively slow time-varying channel, it is possible to significantly enhance the capacity by using adaptive modulation. OFDM is more resistant to frequency selective fading than single carrier systems.
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Disadvantages of OFDM
The OFDM System has the following Disadvantages [1]:
Strict Synchronization Requirement OFDM is highly sensitive to time and frequency synchronization errors, especially at frequency synchronization errors, everything can go wrong. Peak-to-Average Power Ratio(PAPR) PAPR is proportional to the number of subcarriers. Large PAPR of a system makes the implementation of DAC and ADC to be extremely difficult. The design of RF amplifier also becomes increasingly difficult as the PAPR increases.
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OFDM System Design Requirements

OFDM systems depend on four system requirements [1]:
1. available bandwidth play a significant role in determining number of subcarriers.
2. bit rate, It depends on the application the system made for.

3. delay spread, and It determines the length of CP and so the energy loss. 4. the Doppler value. It should be taken into account when designing a mobile station.
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OFDM System Design Parameters

The design parameters are derived according to the system requirements [6]:
1. Number of subcarriers:
Increasing number of subcarriers will reduce the data rate via each subcarrier, which will make sure that the relative amount of dispersion in time caused by multipath delay will be decreased. But when there are large numbers of subcarriers, the synchronization at the receiver side will be extremely difficult as well as PAPR. As a thumb rule, the CP interval must be two to four times larger than the Root-Mean-Square (RMS) delay spread. Symbol duration should be much larger than the guard time to minimize the loss of SNR, but within reasonable amount [12].
2.
Guard time (CP interval) and symbol duration:

3.
Subcarrier spacing:
Subcarrier spacing must be kept at a level so that synchronization is achievable. This parameter will largely depend on available bandwidth and the required number of subchannels.
4.
5.
Modulation type per subcarrier:

This is trivial, because different modulation scheme will give different performance. Adaptive modulation and bit loading may be needed depending on the performance requirement. A suitable FEC coding will make sure that the channel is robust to all the random errors.
FEC coding:
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OFDM System Implementation

In the past, communications systems have typically been implemented using discrete analog components. complicated to build and difficult to tune.
if any aspect of the n system needed to be changed, physical needed to be replaced with new components. DSP techniques extended the capabilities of radio systems Initially, the ASICs were used for this task. it incur large NRE expenses. cannot be modified. More recent trends have been to implement the DSP functions in a DSP or a FPGA [13]. Both DSPs and FPGAs are programmed using abstract programming languages without replacing or fabricating new devices. Most recent FPGAs contains a dedicated DSP blocks [18]. This programmability results in much lower NRE than ASICs.
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Comparison of implementation platforms [10]

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The implementation platforms must satisfy two requirements [11]:
satisfy the tremendous data rate. flexibility. For the SoC to adapt to different operating conditions and standards, there need to be real time conversion of mode, like in [18], in a wireless communication protocol, but also a conversion between different protocols.
May be a more power efficient system with moderate data rate is the need of the day than a system that consumes a lot of energy to give very high data rates. The field is totally open and one may go in any direction just carrying only one objective to develop better and usable communication system [1].
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OFDM System Implementation-FPGA

Recent FPGAs are made of millions of logic gates with special HW banks. The recent FPGAs are complete and concise in supporting OFDM operation. Moreover, there are user-friendly tools available that can be used to program the FPGAs in very short time [1].
So, it is an immense requirement to design an OFDM testbed in FPGA.
A lot of work done to implement the OFDM system using FPGA.

Some of it used FPGA just as a validating and prototyping stage for an ASIC.
20

Qingbo Wang et. al. [12] presented an FPGA-based multi-mode reconfigurable OFDM wireless communication system. The proposed design enables the system to switch between different communication modes, e.g. SISO-OFDM with QPSK or QAM-16 as modulation schemes. They used WARP boards as implementation platform.
The FPGA board is the mother-board with a Xilinx Virtex II Pro VP70 and extension slots.
It is used to implement all the PHY layer logic, basic MAC layer protocol, and user level MAC protocols.
Radio and Clock boards are add-ons, which are plugged into the extension slots on the FPGA board.
The radio board implements the analog functionalities, including D/A, A/D, and RF transceiver. The Clock board is used to synchronize the clocks between different boards.
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they developed a C program on PPC to extend the basic MAC layer protocol. The MAC layer software controlled the underlying hardware.
System Block Diagram of [12]
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Experimental Setup used two PCs. They each were connected to an FPGA board through its Ethernet port. On one of the PCs, media player waited for incoming video packets. On the other PC, was configured to send video clips to the waiting machine.
Experimental setup of [12]

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FPGA Utilization
Experimental Boards
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OFDM System Implementation-ASIC

ASIC is an integrated circuit customized for a particular use.
Little is known about suitable VLSI architectures for MIMOOFDM systems and the corresponding silicon complexity [13].
The first commercial MIMO-OFDMA chip set was developed by Iospan Wireless, Inc. in 2002 for a proprietary fixed wireless system. Several companies have announced MIMO-OFDM chip sets for the upcoming IEEE 802.11n WiFi standard.
Airgo Networks, Inc. offered a prestandard chip set earlier in 2005.

In the mobile WiMAX area (IEEE 802.16e), Beceem Communications, Inc. has developed MIMO-OFDMA chip sets.
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In [14], D. Perels. et al. presented an ASIC implementation of the baseband signal processing unit of a 4 4 MIMO OFDM transceiver. The basic system architecture is based on the SISO IEEE 802.11a Physical Medium Dependent layer.
In the transmitter, the high-rate data stream is first split into four parallel lower rate streams, which are OFDM modulated and sent through the MIMO channel. The received signals, consisting of a superposition of all transmitted signals, are then OFDM demodulated, spatially separated and demultiplexed into a single high-rate stream.
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The design does not include forward error correction coding. Moreover, one I/FFT hardware block is shared by the four transmit (receive) antennas.
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The area requirement of the SISO system is 1.9mm2 and 12.8mm2 for the MIMO-OFDM system. Most of the SISO components have to be replicated in the MIMO case which results in a fourfold chip area increase.
The area occupied by the I/FFT processor increases only by 50% due to an increase in memory requirements in the MIMO case.
Layout of the MIMO-OFDM baseband ASIC manufactured in 0.25 m 1P/5M 2.5V CMOS technology.
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OFDM System Implementation-DSP

DSP is a special-purpose CPU that provides ultra-fast instruction sequences, such as shift and add, and multiply and add, which are commonly used in math-intensive signal processing applications. DSPs are classified by their dynamic range, and the type of arithmetic it performs (fixed or floating point).
In [15], H. Yan et. al. presented an implementation the acoustic OFDM transmitter and receiver on a TMS320C6713 DSP board. The TMS320C6713 DSP board contains C6713, the recent version of the TMS320 family of DSPs provided by Texas Instrument.
It uses VelociTI, a high-performance architecture. The C6713 core has eight independent functional units: 2 fixed-point ALUs, 4 floating-/fixed-point ALUs, and 2 multipliers. So it can execute up to eight 32bit instructions per cycle. There are two general-purpose register files, A and B, which have 32 32-bit registers in total.
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The key components of the acoustic modem is the audio signal input/output module. The C6713 development board has a built-in module for sampling and generating audio signals.
The DSP based prototype for acoustic OFDM modem.

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The OFDM modem prototype works well in the air tasting and the results are similar to those based on Matlab implementations. The initial implementation is to translate the Matlab programs in to C programs that can run on the DSP board.
This initial version takes on the order of minutes for the receiver processing. To identify the time-consuming components, they profiled the execution of the program.
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Pie-chart of the total execution time.
They proposed for future work the following options:

Single-precision (instead of double-precision) floating point operations may speed up the process (i.e. decreasing the number of bits from 64- to 32-bits). The hybrid DSP/FPGA-based solution, which moves time-consuming tasks into FPGA.
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OFDM System Implementation-Hybrid

The growing requirements in the marketplace for design flexibility however, are driving the need for hybrid ASIC/FPGA devices [16] . DSP designers using both ASIC and FPGA within the same design can optimize a system for performance.
Different processing elements are used for different purposes:

The general purpose processors are fully programmable to perform different computational tasks, but they are not energy efficient. The dedicated ASICs are optimized for power and cost. However, they can not be reconfigured to adapt to new applications. FPGAs which are reconfigurable by nature, are good at performing bitlevel operations but not that efficient for word level DSP operations. NoC is used to connect these tiles.
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OFDM system of [17].
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Q Zhang et. al. [17] used MPSoC to implement flexible OFDM baseband for Cognitive Radio.
An example of a heterogeneous MPSoC.
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The parameterizable OFDM part can be reconfigured to adapt to different OFDM systems. The TTL reconfiguration interface is proposed to describe the dynamic behavior of applications and facilitate the implementation on an MPSoC.
An example of a heterogeneous MPSoC.

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Conclusion
The main goal was to present the implementation of any OFDM system, so we concentrated on several important platforms like FPGA, ASIC, DSP, and hybrid platform. One of the primary aims was to identify possible future scopes for research in implementation of the OFDM system design. The field is totally open and one may go in any direction just carrying only one objective to develop better and usable communication system
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References
[1] M. Rahman , S. Das , F. Fitzek, OFDM based WLAN systems, Technical Report, Aalborg University, Denmark, Feb. 2005. [2] WiMAX Forum. "Deployment of Mobile WiMAX Networks by Operators with Existing 2G & 3G Networks" 2007. online: http://www.wimaxforum.org/technology/downl oads/deployment_of_mobile_wimax.pdf [3] J. G. Andrews, A. Ghosh, and R. Muhamed, Fundamentals of WiMAX: Understanding Broadband Wireless Networking, Prentice Hall PTR, March 2007. [4] L. Nuaymi, WiMAX: Technology WileyBlackwell, Jan. 2007. for Broadband Wireless Access.
[5] C.R. Nassar et al., Multi-carrier Technologies for Wireless Communication. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002. [6] R. Van Nee and R. Prasad, OFDM for Wireless Multimedia Communications, Artech House Publishers, Jan. 2000. [7] A. Goldsmith, Wireless Communications. Cambridge University Press, August 2005.
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References
[8] T. Pollet et al., BER Sensitivity of OFDM Systems to Carrier Frequency Offset and Wiener Phase Noise, IEEE Trans. Comm., vol. 43, no. 2-3-4, pp. 191193, February-April 1995. [9] D. Aspel, "Adaptive Multilevel Quadrature Amplitude Radio Implementation in Programmable Logic," master's thesis, Dept. of Electrical Engineering, University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, 2004. [10] N. VOROS and K. MASSELOS, System Level Design of Reconfigurable SystemOn-Chip. Springer, 2005. [11] J. Park, H. Jung, and V. Prasanna, Efficient fpga based implementations of mimo-ofda physical layer, in ERSA, 2006. [12] Q. Wang, L. Zhuo, V. Prasanna, "MULTI-MODE RECONFIGURABLE OFDM COMMUNICATION SYSTEM ON FPGA", Military and Aerospace Programmable Logic Devices Conference (MAPLD), Sep. 2008. [13] H. Bolcskei, Mimo-ofdm wireless systems: Basics, perspectives and challenges, IEEE Wireless Communications, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 3137, Aug. 2006.
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References
[14] D. Perels et al., ASIC Implementation of a MIMO OFDM Transceiver for 192 Mb/s WLANs, Euro. Solid-State Circuits Conf., Sept. 2005, pp. 21518.
[15] H. Yan, S. Zhou, Z. Shi, and B. Li, A DSP implementation of OFDM acoustic modem, in Proc. of the ACM International Workshop on Under Water Networks (WUWNet), Montreal, Quebec, Canada, September 14, 2007.
[16] Zuchowski, P.S.; Reynolds, C.B.; Grupp, R.J.; Davis, S.G.; Cremen, B.; Troxel, B.; , "A hybrid ASIC and FPGA architecture," Computer Aided Design, 2002. ICCAD 2002. IEEE/ACM International Conference on , vol., no., pp. 187- 194, 10-14 Nov. 2002. [17] Qiwei Zhang, Andre B.J. Kokkeler and Gerard J.M. Smit Adaptive OFDM System Design For Cognitive Radio, In: 11th International OFDM Workshop 2006, Aug. Hamburg, Germany, 2006.
[18] A. Saeed et al. "Design and implementation of an Adaptive modulation system," master's thesis, Dept. of Electronics and comm. Engineering, Helwan University, Egypt, 2010.
[19] Ahmed Saeed et. al., Efficient FPGA Implementation of FFT/IFFT. International journal of circuits, systems and signal processing, 3(3):103110, August 2009.
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Comparative Study of OFDM Implementation Platforms

Examiner Prof. H. F. Ragae

Technical Report Ahmed Saeed

Faculty of Engineering Electronics Engineering & Electrical Comm. Department