Efficient simulation of orthogonal multicarrier transmission over multipath fading channels

Abstract

Filterbank orthogonal multicarrier transmission schemes, such as OFDM/OQAM, are currently under intense study for their spectral efficiency and suitability for the physical layer of Cognitive Radio. Nonetheless, the mathematical description of the signal is cumbersome, and closed form expressions for performance figures are not available, so performance analysis on fading channels has to be performed by means of simulations. We propose an algorithm for simulating the received signal over multipath frequency selective fading channels, based on Taylor series expansion of the channel transfer function. The proposed method is compared to the state-of-the-art FFT-based method in terms of computational complexity.